At the Linley Mobile Conference recently, the morning after Linley's keynote was focused on 5G. It is easy to say that nobody knows what the next generation of mobile actually is, but it will be called 5G. The standardization process has been going on for some time. Release 15 will standardize 5G with an expected release in 2020. Early deployments are likely to be limited: few operators, a few cities, a few handsets. The biggest difference between 5G and earlier technologies is that it will be a multi-mode technology, able to use 5G, 4G, and wireless simultaneously, aggregating licensed and unlicensed spectrum, small cell, and regular "large cell" basestations. When I say they will use the technologies simultaneously, I mean more than the way that your current smartphone can switch between WiFi and carrier. The technology will basically use whatever spectrum is available to deliver as much bandwidth as possible, including accessing multiple carriers, using multiple antenna to use multiple connections (MIMO), and so on. One of the challenges is that in the dense urban core, in-building is hard to reach without needing to buy large amounts of spectrum (and not at the highest frequencies that can't penetrate). But buying large amounts of spectrum leaves a lot of it fallow outside the urban core. "In our business, fragmentation is the f-word," said Ali Khayrallah of Ericsson, who didn't present but participated in the panel. There are also new bands to support higher data rates and new protocols for reduced latency and improved spectral efficiency. In fact, on July 14 a few weeks ago, the FCC approved spectrum for 5G, with the explicit goal of creating an environment that will allow the US to lead the world in 5G.The spectrum is at 28GHz, 37GHz, and 39GHz bands, for licensed uses, with an additional band at 64-71GHz for unlicensed use (like the way WiFi operates today in spectrum originally set aside for things like garage door openers). As the FCC chairman Tom Wheeler said: By becoming the first nation to identify high-band spectrum, the United States is ushering in the 5G era of high-capacity, high-speed, low-latency wireless networks. The unlicensed spectrum is important since it will allow carriers who only have as little as 20MHz of licensed spectrum to deploy gigabit class LTE. The FCC also loosened some rules acknowledging that wired communication is dying out The numbers are quite dramatic: in 2000, 200M phones had wired phone service, today just 73M or about 2/3 reduction in 15 years. My kids will never own a wireline phone, I'm sure. In fact the only place they see a phone that looks like that is on their mobile phone where we still use an icon that looks like a very old-fashioned phone to make calls (not that people make a lot of calls any more, we just text). Of course, 5G is coming along around the same time as the Internet of Things (IoT) is expected to produce "billions and billions" of devices. A lot of those devices may just use Bluetooth Low Energy to piggyback off a nearby smartphone to reach the cloud, but in the longer term, 5G is expected to be significant for connecting our "things". There are various lower powered flavors of the standard, for devices that only need limited bandwidth and are delay tolerant. Peter Carlson of Qualcomm gave their view of how 5G is likely to roll out. Since 5G can use existing WiFi and 4G basestation resources, it is possible to start just aggregating existing resources. Then new resources such as small cell and true 5G channels on basestations can be added and performance will improve. Over time the richness of all the various spectrum options and standards will allow high-bandwidth mobile, a huge number of IoT devices, and so on. Previous: CDNLive Bengaluru: Day 2![]()
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