Claro, TIM race for datacenters in Brazil eyeing 5G

Claro and TIM are lining up datacenters in Brazil and facing each other off in a network functions virtualization race. They are not the sole carriers in this process – Telefónica and Oi are also working to virtualize their networks – but announced significant milestones.

TIM confirmed during Futurecom 2018, held this week in São Paulo, that the implementation of 21 new datacenters in Brazil is fully underway.

The carrier's engineering director Marco Di Constanzo said that TIM plans to activate 21 datacenters, 10 of which will be core ones, in which the company is virtualizing its centralized functions, and 11 will be edge ones, which distribute user functions that are more traffic intensive.

These latter datacenters take heavy traffic content such as video streaming closer to the end-customer, reducing latency and increasing speed access.

"5G is not just a 4G evolution, but a 4G transformation, it's going to open up new fronts of business, especially in IoT and as the last mile of the fixed network," TIM's CTO Leonardo Capdeville said during a Futurecom panel.

"5G will born in a virtualized network, so preparing the datacenter for that is key," Oi's architecture and tech director Mauro Fukuda added.

Likewise, América Móvil's Claro Brasil is modernizing its network to make it ready for the future technology.

"We want to be the first to launch 5G in Brazil", CEO Paulo Teixeira told reporters at the event.

América Móvil is building 12 datacenters in the region – four in Brazil – as part of its network functions virtualization and with the objective of bringing content closer to clients, according to the carrier's engineering director André Sarcinelli. The idea is to have them up and running next year.

The modernization process also includes the expansion of the fiber backbone and the update of all of its 20,000 radio base stations – 80% of which reportedly updated – together with the activation of 2,000 more each year.

Claro wants to have its network 100% prepared for the offer of Internet of Things in the LTE CAT-M and NarrowBand IoT (NB-IoT) technologies by the first half of 2019, said Sarcinelli.

With the modernized infrastructure, the company gains capacity, resilience and automation and would be prepared to activate commercial 5G in Brazil. Claro plans to invest 9.6bn reais in Brazil next year, 10% more than in 2018.

Among the demos Claro presented at the event were the transmission of 8K TV signals on the 3.5GHz frequency and the narrow band and LTE-CATN networks in the 700MHz band.