"5G's development: avoiding past 3G flaws"
The annual Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona is currently highlighting 5G as a key topic, underscoring the industry's collective response to the '1,000x' data challenge. However, the path to 5G is not without its hurdles.
Mission-critical services that involve the safety and security of people, property, and trade require levels of reliability and traffic prioritisation that do not exist today in 5G. The sub-1ms target for latency in 5G will be especially difficult to achieve, and the new and integrated infrastructure of 5G represents a huge transformation for operators.
The European Union's 5GPP and flagship METIS research project aim to put the region at the forefront of global standard setting. Tier-1 telcos, represented by the Next Generation Mobile Network alliance (NGMN), have a collective wish list for 5G, which includes access capacity, massive densification, and support for extreme low-latency use cases.
The value chain for 5G will be disrupted, with enterprises accessing network 'slices' that match network resources with the characteristics of their sector and particular use case. This requires new business models to support this paradigm.
The potential funding gap could signal an opportunity for vertical industries to contribute in return for more direct influence. The R&D investment for 5G solutions seems to preclude new entrants, suggesting a two- or three-horse race between Ericsson, Huawei, and Nokia Networks.
5G must integrate multiple air interface options needed for the low-throughput and ultra-low-power devices characteristic of the Internet of Things (IoT). Stéphane Richard, CEO of Orange, commented that 4G was a 'tremendous success' in contrast to the 'industrial project' of 5G transformation and cautioned for the need to time investment with the growth of IoT.
Asia is setting the pace in the race to be first to deploy 5G, with local operators preparing to showcase their capabilities at the 2018 Winter Olympics in South Korea and the 2020 Summer Olympics in Japan. Huawei and Russia's Megafon have pledged to run trials during the 2018 football World Cup in Russia.
The European Commission launched a €700 million 5G Public-Private Partnership (5GPP) fund in 2014 to research 5G, which was then considered a vague concept. Operators around the world are still rolling out LTE and want to see a stronger business case before having to buy more hardware for 5G.
It's important to note that the search results do not contain specific information about which companies published their 5G development wish lists at the Mobile World Congress 2018 or the technological requirements for 5G development.
The industry's goal is to produce the ultimate flexible, intelligent, and unified network for the next decade. However, there is a risk of repeating the experience of building consensus around 3G, which involved a delay of several years between the fanfare and the reality.
In conclusion, the journey towards 5G is promising, but it is also challenging. The industry is collaborating to solve fundamental issues such as global standard agreement, interconnection arrangements, roaming, and ensuring performance across operator boundaries. The ultimate goal is to create a platform for innovation that goes beyond connectivity.
