Claudia Nemat, member of the Board of Management responsible for Europe and Technology, Deutsche Telekom, said 5G — the next mobile Internet standard – will be one of the most trendy topics during the upcoming Mobile World Congress 2014 in Barcelona.
On Thursday, Ericsson said it would showcase 5G concept at the MWC 2014.
Earlier, Huawei said it has already allocated funds for 5G research and development.
ZTE today said 5G is more about customer experience than broadband speed. The evolution of 4G was about broadband speed.
Tips before 5G dreams
Real Wireless warns that 5G is appearing on the horizon and operators need to plan for the next wave of generation upgrades, migrations, devices and service shifts. Operators will also need to manage increasingly complex spectrum-sharing arrangements and roaming agreements.
5G is coming faster than many appreciate, with vendors demonstrating technology and standards activity progressing.
However, as complex as spectrum has been for LTE, with UEs having multiple product SCUs to complicate roaming, it will be even harder for 5G. There will be increasing tension between mobile operators, satellite operators, broadcast TV and other spectrum users. Few operators or regulators are prepared for these issues, which will come to the fore at WRC15.
5G investments by Huawei
Huawei predicts that the first 5G networks will be ready for commercial deployment in 2020, delivering 1 000 times the capacity of current mobile networks and reaching peak data rates of over 10Gbps.
The Chinese telecom equipment vendor began investing in 5G in 2009, and recently announced plans to invest an additional $600 million for research and innovation into 5G technologies by 2018.
“5G will have a fundamental impact on the ICT industry and on our quality of life. Huawei is one of the driving forces in making 5G a reality,” said Wen Tong, head of Wireless Research and head of Communications Technologies Laboratories at Huawei 2012 LAB.
Last month South Korea announced a $1.5 billion plan to roll out a next-generation 5G wireless service. Full-length films might be downloaded within a second. The roadmap foresees a trial service in 2017 and a fully commercial 5G service being available by December 2020.
If LTE and LTE Advanced are already fast, 5G gives another dimension of speed. It might give more than a fibre network feeling to smartphones. Of course, a lot of questions are still unanswered. There are no defined sets of standards yet.
Claudia Nemat on 5G
“Until now 4G tech has only reached some groups of the consumers. Nevertheless, the gold rush for the Next Generation has already started. It is about setting the standards for 5G speeds. States and companies are already deep diving into it,” said Claudia Nemat.
Many companies claimed that 5G technology will be in place by 2020. If you look at the development of technology, that prediction seems reasonable. Up to now roughly every 10 years new mobile generation was introduced.
Let’s take a quick look at statistics: 1981 brought the first 1G system, eleven years later 2G appeared. The year 2001 stands as a beginning of 3G roll out, while over a decade later 4G systems were already fully compliant with IMT Advanced. For pea counters, yes pre-4G systems in fact appeared earlier, nevertheless there is certain logic we will see 5G in 2020 plus/minus x.
“But there is an important aspect beyond access speed: Advanced access technology in mobile means also more traffic within the backbone networks – so our industry needs to invest not only in access technology but also in new backbone architecture: Otherwise the 5G-Ferrari can only drive snail pace,” said Claudia Nemat.
Currently the telecommunication operators in Europe are sandwiched between auctions and regulation that drain our cash and future technology challenges that will need cash for the invest to roll out. Right now, Europe needs to speed up. Especially Asian nations are very keen on setting the next worldwide mobile standard. Asia has understood the decisive impact mobile technology will have in the future:
Today there are 1.2 billion mobile broadband users. This figure is growing by hundreds of millions each year. We will see an enormous increase of (HD-) video-based service usage. Already now LTE-users have a much higher usage than 3G-consumers.
The usage of cloud-based applications will also keep growing. Moreover, there is another source for the further expansion of mobile broadband traffic: The paradigm shift from human-centric to human & machine-centric systems. Some may be surprised but in fact fridges or ovens with an IP addresses are already on the market.
Various studies show that the number of devices connected to Internet is expected to increase from 5 bn. in 2010 to 50 bn. in 2020, mainly because of massive machine-to-machine communication introduction.
