5G Fronthaul - Impact of Fiber

Raise your hand if you can tell me when 4G LTE was introduced. If you’re curious and look at the search engine results (like I did), you will see that the technology first hit the market around 2010. With that introduction, the networking community began rolling out higher speed links to cell towers that forced upgrades from copper to fiber to handle the backhaul. With 4G LTE, cell sites evolved into small cells as well as indoor and outdoor distributed antenna systems (DAS) in order to obtain the high speeds enabled by the 4G LTE architecture. Everything worked great. It’s been less than a decade since the intro so why change now?