By John T Chapman, Cisco Systems
The world as we know it in cable is about to change. Today’s cable operators are tomorrow’s mobile operators.
This is being driven by a multitude of factors. For one, it is a way of significantly increasing revenues. All the cable broadband customers have cell phones and are often paying two different service providers, one for wireline and one for wireless. Does that really make sense Remember the telephone network? That country wide collection of twisted pair copper and T1 lines? It does not exist anymore. Telephony is an application that runs over an IP network. There is no Wi-Fi network. Wi-Fi is a radio gateway that exists at the end of an IP network that provides end point connectivity.
Today, we still have separate and distinct mobile and cable networks. But not for long. These too will soon also become applications running over an IP network. As mobile moves to 5G and deploys small cells running at higher frequencies, that small cell will become a Radio Frequency (RF) gateway that converts between wireless and a wireline IP network with traffic tunneled to a 5G core (5GC).