With millions of consumers dealing with vision impairment, hearing loss and other physical disabilities, cable operators and vendors have been making great strides in meeting the needs of these customers. Most notably, Comcast, Charter and Cox have all created special labs to design, develop and test new accessibility products and services. What have they come up with so far? What's in the works now? What else are they exploring?

In this session, experts will discuss the latest accessibility advances and the challenges they have had to overcome.

Heavy Reading survey data shows that operator deployment drivers for 5G networks are shifting as the focus moves beyond only faster speeds (primarily for consumer markets) to new markets and new services (heavily targeting enterprises). This is where the advanced 5G functions, defined in URLLC and mMTC use cases, come in to play. The coming shift beyond higher data rates to advanced 5G services has big implications for the supporting transport networks, including fronthaul, midhaul and backhaul – collectively called "xhaul."

In this special webinar, Heavy Reading will be joined by leading experts from Ericsson, Fujitsu, Infinera, and Nokia to unveil key findings from Heavy Reading’s 2021 global 5G Transport operator survey exploring transport network considerations and requirements to meet the challenges of the next phase of 5G services.

Topics addressed will include:

• Operator plans for centralized RANs and cloud RANs
• Addressing challenges for network-based timing and synchronization
• Approaches to handling legacy CPRI in hybrid 4G/5G networks
• White box routers for xhaul: DCSG and other options
• Impacts of edge compute on transport networks, and vice versa

Telecom networks are going through significant transformation, becoming highly dynamic and increasingly disaggregated. NFV, SDN, 5G, Open RAN and edge computing epitomize these changes. New versions of Virtualized and Cloud-native Network Functions are being deployed at an ever-increasing cadence. This is happening in tandem with the introduction of many new service types. For example, 5G network slicing will bring new monetization opportunities for operators. But to be profitable it will require a high degree of automation. To complicate matters, these exciting new technologies will still depend on legacy, physical network devices.

Service providers are increasingly realizing the key to automation is the modernization of their inventory systems. By doing this they can shield their fulfillment and orchestration platforms from the complexity of the underlying network infrastructure which is comprised of multiple generations of technology both physical and virtualized.

Join this webinar to learn:

• What challenges CSPs are facing with data integrity in their network management
• How to discover and manage network elements across today’s dynamic, hybrid networks
• Why inventory with Auto-Discovery and Reconciliation capabilities is key to automating the service delivery lifecycle, assuring 5G networks and delivering on SLAs