Can a Park Bench Boost 5G?

As India’s long-awaited 5G deployment draws nearer, a new pilot program may prompt you to look at ordinary objects—like lampposts, mailboxes, and park benches—much differently.

This program will equip street furniture with small cell networks across four different locations: Indira Gandhi International Airport in Delhi, Bengaluru Metro Rail Corporation, Kandla Port in Gujarat, and Bhopal city.

Other topics in the mix of this month’s recommended content: fiber’s role in combating climate change, the information war in Ukraine, a new podcast feature, Latin American bandwidth trends, and a free guide to SD-WAN vendors. 

TRAI bets on lampposts to accelerate 5G infrastructure

A new pilot program—launched by the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India—aims to expand India’s 5G infrastructure in an unexpected way.

As mentioned, the program will equip street furniture with small cell networks across four key locations. According to Light Reading, “Using street furniture could help India achieve the densification of networks necessary for high speed connectivity with low latency of less than one millisecond.”

Here’s how AT&T, Verizon, Consolidated are prepping their networks for climate change

Our own Pete Bell has written about how 5G can help combat climate change.

In this piece, Fierce Telecom discusses how fiber is “poised to play a key role in operator efforts to harden their networks against the effects of climate change.”

Keep reading to learn more on this topic and hear how AT&T, Verizon, and Consolidated Communications are taking action.

The War on Ukraine Is Testing the Myth of Elon Musk

In light of the ongoing conflict, our team recently covered fiber’s role in Ukraine’s information war. (We also wrote about sanctions hitting Russia’s tech sector and some background on Ukrainian operators and telcos.)

We touched on the practicality of Elon Musk’s plan to send additional terminals to Ukraine, and we recommend this article from The Atlantic for more context.

Peering into the arteries of the Internet

Alan Mauldin made an appearance on Marketplace Tech’s Daily Tech Podcast to talk submarine cables last month.

This month, we’ve got another tantalizing talk to share with you. Listen to this episode of APNIC’s podcast, PING, to glean even more subsea cable knowledge—in just 25 minutes.

Latam used international bandwidth to reach 700Tbps by 2026

TeleGeography Senior Analyst Anahí Rebatta once again set the scene for Capacity LATAM with the 2022 version of her annual regional overview.

Her presentation covered the latest Latin American market trends—touching on bandwidth demand, submarine cable connectivity, newly established cloud regions, price erosion, and more.

One big takeaway? As this Capacity headline suggests, demand is (and is forecasted to remain) strong.

The 2022 SD-WAN Guide Is Here

Meet the 2022 edition of our SD-WAN Guide—detailing 26 SD-WAN vendors and 90 managed SD-WAN providers in one handy PDF.

If you’re not familiar with this free resource, here’s what you ought to know.

As the SD-WAN market matures, there’s been a growing need to more thoroughly catalog the many vendors who offer this service.

Luckily, our SD-WAN Research Service has been cataloging the vendor landscape since SD-WAN came on the scene. We extracted detailed vendor profiles and turned them into this guide. You can download your copy over here.

Think you’ve got something that should be on our monthly reading list? Tweet it to us @TeleGeography.