Digital Bridge CEO Marc Ganzi: “We’re in the First Inning of 5G”

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Wireless West Conference

The third annual Wireless West conference closed yesterday in Los Angeles with an emphasis on 5G and its coming global deployment.  Digital Bridge co-founder and CEO Marc Ganzi, told the attendees to think of 5G as a baseball game. “We are in the first inning,” he said. “There is a lot of work to do, and it is time to buckle up and get busy.”

Ganzi stressed the need for forward thinking in regards to the scale of the rollout required to meet the exponentially increasing need for data, not just in North America, but in rapidly expanding markets across the world. To that end, Ganzi stressed the ever-increasing importance of creating data-centers to support that growth and how it must be created by looking to the future.

“People are no longer conducting their lives in the same way they have for the last 20 years,” he said. “For example, Weston, an upwardly-mobile and decently-sized suburb of Ft. Lauderdale will require 20 racks to accommodate the Amazon needs alone, generated by the community.”  Data requires power and there will be increasing competition for that power supply in the near future, he warned.

Ganzi also spoke to the key elements of success in a bandwidth delivery business model that is customer-centric.  A key challenge is the ability to deliver all aspects of communication infrastructure, creative 5G offerings to keep rent low for carriers via MiMo, C-RAN, and SDN, speed in entitlements, accuracy in RF planning and network delivery. 

Closing out Thursday’s general sessions was a panel entitled: “The Race to Lead in #5G.”  Panelist Martha Ventura, VP of Engineering and Operations at T-Mobile, said, “We’re committed to spending the capital to make 5G a reality. We already have a very dense network, so we believe our infrastructure is an asset we can leverage…The 4G network is the foundation for 5G. Every dollar we spend and every step we take, gets us a step closer to 5G. 5G is going to leverage the 4G network and 5G network simultaneously.”

Wireless West closed with an official announcement that the conference will be heading to Arizona in 2019.

April 13, 2018

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