It’s not hard to find superlatives to describe the world 5G technology will create. This is the “fourth industrial revolution,” a world of unprecedented connectivity where the consumer experience will reach new pinnacles and artificial intelligence and machine learning will transform everyday life.
According to Qualcomm chief executive Steve Mollenkopf, 5G goes far beyond scaling up speed and bandwidth and reducing latency. Sure, we are being tantalized with the vision of a world where a 5-GHz signal offers speeds of up to 1Gbps for tens of connections, but what will it actually do?
“5G will have an impact similar to the introduction of electricity, or the car, affecting entire economies, and benefiting entire societies,” Mollenkopf told the recent Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.
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“Today, billions of mobile devices with extraordinary power are uniting with advancements in robotics, artificial intelligence, autonomous vehicles, nanotechnology and so much more. Entire industries will change and emerge as data speeds go up and data costs come down.”
Sounds exciting, and it probably will be. But there is a lot to go through before 5G arrives in 2020, and another time lag before the technology starts to deliver on its promise.
In the meantime, milestones are ticking by as the telecoms industry matures. The original iPhone is marking its 10 year anniversary as operators like AT&T finally stop supporting it. Meanwhile 2G networks are being turned off in Singapore this year.
In the 5G world, vendors are teaming up with operators around the world to build their networks, tests are being completed and the results announced, but we are less than three years away from 2020.
How will that impact the business models of incumbent telcos? The advent of 5G has many of them paddling desperately to transform and survive.
Companies like Blackberry are betting their entire future on 5G, as their effort swings from manufacturing devices no-one wants anymore to creating software for 5G connected vehicles. The probability is that there will be corporate carnage in the industry as some dinosaurs become extinct, while new and better adapted species evolve.
Already, the advent of 5G is driving unprecedented industry collaboration. China Mobile, for example, is working with 40 global companies on its 5G offering and many of them - such as General Motors - are from outside the traditional ICT sector.
So the vision might be growing clearer the closer we get, but the likelihood is that 5G will be a slow roll-out, and no Big Bang. Right now we have LTE, and that seems to be delivering pretty well as the boundaries of 4G are pushed out.
According to the GSMA, there are four key applications which 5G can do which LTE cannot: augmented reality, virtual reality, the tactile internet and autonomous driving. One thing which is for certain is that the 5G networks won’t be cheap to build.
Major Chinese operators, for example, are about to spend around $45 billion by 2020 to achieve nationwide 5G coverage, an investment which could also have the benefit - for China - of its technology and services becoming the de facto global standard.
Investment of that magnitude will need some serious return on investment (ROI) if it is to pay off. Given that China is the world’s number one mobile phone market, with 1.3 billion subscribers, that could be a reasonable bet.
Add to that the fact that the Beijing Government is pushing the implementation of autonomous vehicles by 2025, and wants self-driving cars to comprise 10% of the market by 2030, and the 5G business case has a new dimension.
After all, it’s not just about delivering new services to smartphones. Autonomous cars are only one area of application. There are revolutions planned in health care and logistics, for example, which will totally transform the way services are delivered.
In South Korea, SK Telecom announced in January that it would invest $4.2 billion (5 trillion won) on new businesses based around artificial intelligence, autonomous driving, and the Internet of Things (IoT).
These businesses will need a 5G network to run on, of course, and SKT has already announced a $5 billion investment in that.
“Once the 5 trillion won is poured into the industries, it will provide opportunities for growth to front and rear industries, inducing production worth 9 trillion won and more than 60,000 new jobs,” SKT said in its statement.
The idea is that 5G will be an enabler and an economic multiplier on a scale we have rarely seen before. Like a new highway between two remote cities or the establishment of a new port, but many times over, the infrastructure has the potential to foster a host of new businesses springing up through industry verticals.
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In the US alone, consultancy Accenture has forecast that the deployment of 5G networks could create up to three million new jobs - both directly and indirectly - and add around $500 billion to US GDP. In a January 2017 report, Accenture estimates that to achieve this, operators will have to invest as much as $275 billion over seven years as they build out 5G.
Seven years? Does that mean that the 5G world will only gain momentum by 2025?
Given the scale of the build-out and the intensity of the transformation, that is probably reasonable. So let’s not get so hung up about 2020.
Accenture talks about “three tidal effects” from 5G: the 5G business model will facilitate evolution and collaboration, new RAN architecture will promote disruption in greenfield areas, and network and IT architecture will merge, leading to a “tidal” transformation in stacks, processes and people.
“Vertical industry will drive the 5G business case and monetization will require an ecosystem play,” said the consultancy.
It sees verticals such as automotive, manufacturing, health, consumer and retail directing global GDP into 5G transformation, adding “pervasive” connectivity to business architectures.
Accenture’s advice to operators: create a horizontal platform which can best expose 5G capabilities to partners and customers. It’s all about speed of deployment and agility.
“The report shows what an incredible opportunity there is in all community sizes,” said Tejas Rao, Accenture’s managing director and mobile offering network lead for the North American practice. “5G-powered smart city solutions applied to the management of vehicle traffic and electrical grids alone could produce an estimated $160 billion in benefits and savings for local communities.”
Smart cities is a phrase which also resonates in Telecom Asia’s own patch, particularly in India. There, the government of Narendra Modhi wants to build 100 smart cities by 2020, and nearly 100 initiatives are already set for implementation in 20 initial locations.
For this, 5G is not just an enabler, but is seen as a nation builder. All these are big predictions, and great expectations. Prepare for some cynicism along the way, but get ready for some spectacular results.
5G future for auto industry
Just over a decade ago, the most sophisticated piece of communications equipment in cars was the radio.
Today, the automotive industry is one of the hottest points of intersection between telecoms vendors, IT companies, operators and old world car makers, with Ford - one of the oldest - saying it is in transformation to a “technology company.”
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In September last year, the cross-industry 5G Automotive Association (5GAA) was formed by players in the telecommunications and automotive sectors.
The idea is that it will be a co-operative forum to develop, test and promote communications solutions, support standardization and accelerate commercial applications.
There are also applications which span transport and logistics. Truck maker Scania is using 5G mobile technology in its driverless systems, such as an upcoming Singapore trial of “autonomous truck platooning,” where one truck leads three autonomous trucks to fully automate the docking and unloading of cargo.
5GAA membership includes some of the big names in both sectors, such as Daimler, BMW, ZTE, China Mobile, and Denso. Major chipmakers Intel and Qualcomm, both members of the 5GAA, have launched 5G chips with automotive applications in mind.
With the development of autonomous vehicles, the car of the future will be a complete ecosystem for the smart Internet of Vehicles.
As BMW has said, 5G networks are essential for making driverless cars function effectively, because they will need to transmit data constantly to the cloud and communicate with other vehicles and landmarks along the route.
Smart Cities will need Smart Vehicles as their mode of transport, and 5G will deliver a world of connectivity for security, control and information needs.
There are risks, however, and security is a key issue.
This is why cyber security vendor Gemalto, which sees itself as a major player in 5G networks, is also a 5GAA member. Gemalto’s slogan “Security to be Free” could have been designed exclusively with the auto industry in mind.
Already, major car makers experimenting with advanced communication have had issues with cyberattacks.
A Chrysler Jeep was hacked in 2015, when attackers used the car’s connected radio to gain access to the vehicle’s main functions.
For this reason, some vendors are going in another direction.
Waymo, which provides driverless technology to Google’s self-driving car project and is working on trials with Fiat Chrysler, says cars using its system will remain offline from the internet for the majority of time to protect them from hacks. In Wymo cars, there is no continuous connection to the cloud and - in the words of Waymo chief John Krafcik - the vehicles “communicate with the outside world only when they need to.”
This is a direct contrast to the approach of the 5GAA, which is embracing connectivity and 5G technologies as the way forward for the industry.
Some technology companies, such as Blackberry, are staking their entire future on the auto industry. The Canadian company, which has received $100 million from the Canadian Government, announced in December 2016 that its 400 workers in Ottawa would refocus specifically on software for autonomous vehicles.
Interference needs new solutions
5G mobile data promises to deliver a world of new services and capabilities, but interference remains an issue which must be solved if networks are to meet performance expectations.
The 5G environment will be so much denser than anything we know today. There will be so much more capacity in a given area through the use of more antennas and small cells.
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A denser environment demands efficient measures and new approaches to mitigating interference, as well as new modulation schemes to improve spectral and power efficiency and minimize out of band interference.
Right now, engineers throughout the industry are working hard on ensuring that the almost ubiquitous transmissions across a multitude of frequencies and billions of devices - many of them mobile - do not interfere with each other.
They are looking beyond the lower frequency spectrum - 700-MHZ and 2.6-GHz - used by most carriers today, and heading towards 6-GHZ and up to 38-GHz and beyond into the extremely high frequency bands known as millimeter wave.
Existing frequency bands below 6-GHz will still be utilized in next generation networks, but 5G will also push the adoption of millimeter-wave bands, some of which is likely to remain unlicensed.
The effective use of these millimeter waves will require newly-developing techniques so that signals can reach user devices without generating too much interference or overly consuming energy resources.
These higher frequencies have the advantage of using beamforming, which instead of broadcasting signals in all directions send them directly to devices, be they mobile or fixed.
Beamforming, which can be described as similar to the way a spotlight illuminates a target, allows for the installation of hundreds of antennas in small spaces, all of them delivering narrow beams with very specific uses and targets.
Working in concert with millimeter-wave and beamforming is MIMO technology (multiple input, multiple output), where equipment can have multiple antennas.
This is likely to create better data rates, spectral and energy efficiency, and become the antithesis of broadcasting. MIMO will improve the capacity and signal quality of a cell.
A combination of MIMO and beamforming together mitigate the signal and path loss typically experienced in higher frequency bands, facilitating access to millimeter-wave frequency ranges which have up until now been considered unsuitable for many mobile applications.
Millimeter-wave has the advantage, in the 5G context, of having a short range and an abrupt drop-off in signal strength. This means they can be deployed in high density scenarios with lower interference between adjacent cells.
Understanding the propagation of millimeter-wave frequencies and how to manage potential radio interference is still something of a work in progress as the industry counts down to 5G.
This article first appeared on Telecom Asia 5G Insights February 2017 Edition