As great as 5G is, it still isn’t fully delivering on its potential when it comes to things like network slicing – a technology that so far has barely been used – but BT just successfully deployed its first real world 5G Standalone mobile broadband network using network slicing.
That sentence is a bit of a mouthful so let’s break it down. 5G Standalone – sometimes abbreviated to 5GSA – refers to a 5G network that doesn’t rely on any legacy 4G connectivity or infrastructure. It’s built purely for 5G, and as such is positioned to take full advantage of the tech, including the best possible speeds, lower latency, and other features – including network slicing.
Network slicing then means carving out slices of a network to create multiple virtual networks from one physical network. These virtual networks are isolated from each other, so traffic on other parts of the physical network won’t affect them, and they can be tailored to fit whatever specific use case they’re needed for.
Beer money
In the case of this one, BT was using the network to power payments in Lavery’s Beer Tent at the Belfast Christmas Market. The network was up and running for two weeks, and it ensured fast, reliable payment processing for thousands of customers using eight mobile payment terminals.
Without this network slice, Lavery’s Beer Tent would presumably have had to rely on the general network that the many thousands of other people at the market were using, and given how busy the Belfast Christmas Market was, it’s likely that there would have been periods of network congestion, which when it comes to processing payments can slow things down, and potentially even stop payments going through.
So this network slice avoided all of those problems, and this is just one possible use case for network slicing – any number of businesses could benefit, particularly when working away from their Wi-Fi-blanketed offices, and other things such as online gaming could also be improved by using a dedicated slice of a network.
Paul Murnaghan, BT Group’s Northern Ireland Director, said: “Businesses increasingly rely on technology that’s able to cope with the demands of the ever-pervasive digital world, securely. We have all visited a retailer and had the awkward ‘wait while we check’ to see if a payment has been completed correctly. Network slicing helps tackle this problem by enabling consistently fast and smooth connectivity, critically giving certainty to both traders and customers even when the network is busy in specific locations like Belfast Christmas Market.”
While this is BT’s first such real world trial, Vodafone carried out an even bigger test of network slicing at last year’s Glastonbury festival.
However, the technology still isn’t widely used, and even 5G Standalone still isn’t available everywhere that has 5G. But in the next few years perhaps network slices will be a far more commonplace occurrence.
