As telecommunications and other networking-focused companies look to 5G as an imminent shift in the nature of wireless technology, a bounty of ideas for how to best put it to work can be drawn just from studying previous generations.

“In the network today … it’s much softer and flexible. It moves away from a single-purpose built power to something much more flexible. … It makes the network fundamentally different,” said Caroline Chan (pictured, middle), vice president and general manager of the Network Platform Group at Intel Corp.

She and Dan Rodriguez (pictured, right), vice president of the Data Center Group at Intel, called in from the Mobile World Congress conference in Barcelona, Spain, to speak with John Furrier (@furrier), co-host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile live streaming studio. They discussed their thoughts on 5G, network infrastructures and where Intel is making investments for those coming changes. (*Disclosure below.)

“Last year this time, the people coming in had a lot of questions about 5G technology,” Chan said. “This year … I think the conversation’s switched from ‘Will there be a 5G?’ to solutions,” she said, citing the engagement from Apple, Nextel and Verizon, as well as the increased interest and proposals in the space of autonomous cars and smart cities.

“It becomes technology to solutions,” she noted.

According to Rodriguez, “the key linkage of all those use-cases is that the network needs to become more intelligent, more flexible and definitely more agile to be able to support this wide variety of use-cases.”

He also felt that operators and OEMs were “rallying behind … the path to 5G” and that with their support that path would be much easier to navigate.

A fundamental change

“5G takes [things] to the next level,” Chan said. “2G, 3G and 4G is about networks built for … a general-purpose network. … 5G fundamentally changes this. Why? They’re changing infrastructure itself.”

Touching on the specialization of algorithms to provide the best fit of service to the needs of a user, such as shifting to provide a more stable connection over the prioritization of precise location services, Rodriguez acknowledged that the importance of low-latency connections is understood and being addressed, with software-defined solutions a key part of those answers.

Dynamic resource sharing and configuration were also highlighted as ways Intel is addressing the changing needs of connectivity, but as Rodriguez specified, “The key thing that we’re really seeing … and investing in is first that it really takes a village to pull off this network transformation and the movement to 5G.”

Addressing how the network is becoming more pliable, software-defined, resilient and agile, Rodriguez felt that one of its strongest attributes was in how “you can really invest in many of these innovations we’re discussing today.”

With a growing number of companies investing in “FlexCore, network in a box, mobile-edge computing,” and other solutions, network transformation is becoming an immediate possibility, allowing early adopters to “transform your network now, utilizing network function virtualization, and then you have a sturdy foundation when all the 5G use-cases come online in the next years,” Rodriguez concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of the Mobile World Congress 2017 Barcelona. (*Disclosure: Intel was the sponsor of this segment. Intel has no editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE