The state of 5G in APAC is as diverse as the continent itself. Ceragon’s President APAC, Africa and Middle-East, Mario Querner, tells Dr. Dahlit Brin about the 5G landscape, the opportunities and how Ceragon’s unique technology can help provide a 5G WOW experience to this very interesting continent.
Full interview transcript:
Hello and welcome back to the Backhaul Lounge. I'm Dahlit Brin, and today I'm joined by Mario Querner, who's our regional president for AsiaPAC and Africa. Mario, so nice to have you here in the Backhaul Lounge.
It's a pleasure for me to be here.
I'm really excited that you could join us. You're responsible for a very interesting region, AsiaPAC. There is a lot going on in 5G. Can you tell us more about it?
Sure. So, Asia Pacific is a very fragmented market in the 5G. So we have very advanced countries like Korea, also China. We have Japan. All these markets are very fast in the 5G rollout. Australia, New Zealand. On the other side, we have also countries such as Indonesia. They are still in the full speed of 4G.
What does it mean in terms of the challenge that the operators are facing and how what can we, as Ceragon, help to provide those operators who are in the midst of rolling out 5G? What can we do to help them provide that 5G WOW experience to their subscribers?
So, Ceragon is helping today, already many operators in Asia on the 5G. So we are supplying to many operators advanced solutions. So, the uniqueness of Ceragon is to help the customers with the challenges 5G brings. It means also more capacity, higher transmission rates, also at multiple kilometer distances. And Ceragon's advantage is, we have a solution which provides higher transmission rate at a traditional microwave spectrum. We can go to 2, 4, 8 gigabit in the traditional microwave, thanks to our unique ultra-wide channel we have in the microwave. We can go up to 224 MHz ultra-wide channel. And this will help the customers on more capacity. So, 5G will require higher transmission rate and Ceragon has the solution on one hand side. On the other hand side, we have also operators who are embracing now, on the radio access network, the open network architecture. And these open network architecture, Ceragon has embraced a few years ago already a disaggregation open network architecture for the transport layer. So what does it mean? So the advantages are you don't have a vendor lock-in. You get products out on the shelf for layer three applications for IP MPLS. So, all this is supported by Ceragon and, on top of it, it's recognized by the TIP, by the Telecom Infrastructure Project, people know this - where Ceragon is the only transmission provider, solution provider, who has been recognized in all three categories.
Right. It's certainly a very strong competitive advantage we have and we're proud of it. OK, can you tell us about specific use cases that you find fascinating that we've been able to roll out and anything that you really want to highlight?
So, we have on one-hand side the traditional microwave, I just shared. But obviously, on the smaller distances, we also have the demand, particularly on fronthaul, for even higher capacity, like I mentioned earlier, and here we have a solution in the e-band spectrum, 80 gigahertz, where we provide today 20 gigabit in the layer one bonding, which means we are one of the only one who are providing this high capacity. And even more interesting is we can combine those a microwave with the millimeter wave to make it longer distances at higher availability, at a higher transmission rates. And we have operators, in Australia, for example, who are embracing this kind of technology to benefit out of high availability and higher transmission rate together, thanks to Ceragon.
While optimizing total cost of ownership, specifically with our multi-vendor capabilities.
Yes.
Mario, thank you so much for joining us today. It remains a very fascinating topic and I'm very happy to hear back from you very soon as we as we will be watching what goes on in your region. So thank you so much for sparing the time to be with us today. And thank you for being with us in the Backhaul lounge. I'm inviting you, as always, to join us on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. and see you soon.
Thank you very much, Dahlit.
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