LIVE FROM GSMA MOBILE WORLD CONGRESS AMERICAS 2017: US operators are steadily pushing toward 5G, but one of the key challenges they face in a world of massive capacity is distribution, Nokia North America executives said Tuesday.

During a media roundtable, Nokia North America CTO Mike Murphy said the transformation to 5G will require a significant restructuring of operator networks rather than just incremental changes. Adjusting to improve distribution and keep latency low is at the top of the list, he said.

“So today, in a typical structure in the US you might have five to ten very, very large sites where a lot of the traffic goes back and a lot of the core network services are located,” he explained. “In this distribution, to accommodate for the capacity, you don’t want to backhaul all that capacity 2,000 miles where you physically cannot get the latency requirements down to where you want them by backhauling it. So you have to move it more to the edge.”

Murphy said the changes required for this distributed architecture include both more fibre to the edges and the introduction of edge clouds that can move parts of the core functions out to the edge.

Murphy acknowledged distributed networks are more complex, but said a large chunk of that problem can be solved with automation via software defined networking.

“Network architecture has to change,” Nokia North America Head Rick Corker added. “The core networks have to change. Virtualisation becomes important. Transport – your IP and optic networks – become really critical… the reality is mobile networks are becoming fixed.”

Nokia said these changes take years and involve both a technical transformation, but also internal organisational changes.

Operators will also have to decide how far above and beyond the standard they want to go, in building out their edge cloud infrastructure.

For instance, Murphy believes an operator could choose to put one cloud in San Francisco or 100, and that will in turn impact performance markers like latency.

The fundamentals of operator plans should be set by the end of this year, and execution is expected to begin next year, according to Nokia, while the market should expect to see “real 5G” deployed as early as 2019.