Fibre will underpin our 5G future, says ITS Technology Group at Connected North

Interview

At this year’s Connected North conference in Manchester, we caught up with Mark Weller, Director and Head of Infrastructure at ITS Technology Group, to discuss why fibre will play a key role in the UK’s ongoing 5G rollout

The UK’s 5G rollout is well underway, but as networks begin to densify new connectivity challenges will begin to emerge.

“The big challenge with 5G densification and making it work is fibre – it’s the backhaul,” explained Weller. “5G coverage will need to be at street level because the old masts sat on top of buildings are covering too much area. So, you’re looking at traffic lights, street furniture, shop fronts – and all of these will need fibre.”

Similar challenges can also be found with the advent of mobile edge computing; as new edge data centres begin to spring up closer to the customers needs, these too will require a fibre connection to deliver

“We heard in the keynote session this morning just how much the hyperscalers are driving demand for data centre connectivity,” he said. “We’re already deploying a lot of fibre to data centres in city clusters and this will only grow as more and more of our data sits in the cloud.”