5G is coming: What to expect and why

I received a very interesting email from IDTechEx this morning - one of many I get and usually do not have time to read. However, the title "5G is coming: What to expect and why" caught my eye so I did read it and found it very interesting. Having worked at the vanguard of 2.5G/3G mobile data communications in the early 2000s, it all seems very familiar in terms of the technological standards and challenges and, most importantly, the challenge of adoption rates, investment requirements and what the "killer apps" will be. 

The article gives a good overview of the type of opportunities which could be addressed by 5G and other emerging communications technologies, from smart buildings to asset tracking, medical diagnostics, virtual reality and autonomous vehicles. 

However, as with all enabling technologies, the secret to success and adoption will be creating unique and differentiating business solutions and business models that can exploit the technology. Businesses should not get too caught up in the underlying technologies - that is for the chip and device manufacturers and the network providers to create a robust service - but instead focus on identifying the business problems that could be addressed. 

If you focus on the consumer space, you never know, your business could be the next WhatsApp, Instagram, Uber, Spotify, Netflix or Strava. But equally (and much more likely) you could develop a unique application or service offering to make businesses, healthcare and social enterprises more efficient, secure and worthwhile to global and local economies and society as a whole. 

This sort of thinking needs an approach to innovation which many organisations and individuals do not have time for as they deal with the many current day-to-day challenges they face. However, it is worth taking time out occasionally and spend time as a board, with your management teams, your workforce, partners and customers to think about what the future could hold. You don't want to miss an opportunity and have someone else come in and disrupt your industry and business, leaving you with a very limited and declining future. 

I have pasted part of the original article from IDTechX below. For details of their research report, IoT Low Power Wireless Networks and 5G 2019-2029: Global Forecasts, Technologies, Applications, go to: https://www.idtechex.com/research/reports/iot-low-power-wireless-networks-and-5g-2019-2029-global-forecasts-technologies-applications-000614.asp 

5G is coming: What to expect and why 

by Dr Luyun Jiang, Technology Analyst, IDTechEx  www.IDTechEx.com 5th-Generation Wireless Systems (5G), says the optimist, will revolutionize our life as the 3G/4G systems did. While the majority are still waiting to link to the 4G network, the top telecoms have started the war for the next generation of mobile communication. 5G is expected to finally bring the autonomous car, VR and internet of things to reality and make science fiction come true. 

So why are people so keen on 5G? Early efforts on 5G have been driven and centred around three main features (as summarised in figure 1). 

• Enhanced mobile broadband (eMBB): telecoms expect 5G to be able to deliver over 1 Gbit/s. The first 5G chip trailed by Qualcomm in 2017 has successfully reached this number, and the trails by Ericsson and NTT DoCoMo even achieved 10 Gbit/s in the 15GHz band. The fastest figure so far is 35 Gbit/s by M1 and Huawei for a trial in Singapore. 
• Massive machine-type connections (mMTC): massive connections will support vast numbers of connected devices, thereby allowing Internet of Things (IoT) to flourish. 5G will allow more than 1 million devices connections per cell site or per km2 (200-400 for current networks). 
• Ultra-reliable low-latency communications (uRLLC): uRLLC will target virtual-reality applications, autonomous vehicles, robot and remote medical services. The latency can be as low as 1 ms end-to-end (E2E) delay (53 ms for 4G and 64 ms for 3G) 

4G is not the only competitor for 5G. There are a number of new connection technologies, such as NB-IoT, LoRa and Sigfox which also offer solutions to the emerging market of IoT (for more details read the IDTechEx Research report IoT Low Power Wireless Networks and 5G 2019-2029: Global Forecasts, Technologies, Applications). With high throughput and low latency, 5G is the most promising technique to tackle the high-value areas including 3D robotic control, virtual reality monitoring and remote medical control. Those are the problems that today's technologies have not addressed yet. Figure 1: 5G use cases for three main segments Source: IDTechEx Research 

[abridged section]

However, IDTechEx Research finds that there is also a growing pessimism on the widespread adoption of 5G, coming from many policymakers and telecoms companies, such as surprisingly, Huawei, one of the leading 5G standard contributors. They argued that 5G will become incredibly expensive for operators to deploy, requiring tens of thousands of new base stations per country and enormous investment in the structures upgrade. Some claim that most consumers would not notice its benefits and that operators would struggle to make money from it. There are questions mingling around. Why we want to deploy 5G while 4G is until not yet fully covered? Will there be enough reliable 5G coverage or just in a few areas, limiting some benefits to certain locations? Is it actually any good for IoT based on power requirements versus the other types, which may also have a lower data cost plan due to their cheaper infrastructure? The future of 5G is still far from a certainty. 

For all revolutionary technologies, we can never fully predict what they will bring to us and how they will change our lives until they have already done so. Despite all the challenges, the standardization of 5G has moved quickly. 3GPP is expected to approve the first release of all the necessary standards for 5G by the end of this year, and first commercialized deployment might come very soon afterwards. There is no doubt that 5G is coming. 

 Learn more about 5G and Low power Wide Area Networks at IoT Application Conference and Exhibition, hosted by IDTechEx, on Nov 14-15 at Santa Clara, CA. For more details see www.idtechex.com/iotusa.