A sure sign that 5G development is truly underway: two industry organizations released white papers at Mobile World Congress 2015 in Barcelona outlining their respective visions of 5G.
The operator-driven NGMN Alliance released their 5G white paper [PDF] at a press event at MWC Tuesday, outlining the “key end-to-end operator requirements intended to guide the development of future technology platforms and related standards, create new business opportunities and satisfy future end-user needs.”
The NGMN Alliance says the white paper serves as “a guideline for 5G definition and design, and provides also insight into areas of further exploration by NGMN and other industry stakeholders.”
In essence, 5G must be designed to support the demands of a fully mobile and connected society that will be characterized by “tremendous growth in connectivity and density/volume of traffic, the required multi-layer densification in enabling this, and the broad range of use cases and business models expected.”
That means higher speeds, connectivity density, mobility range and reliability (and far lower latency) in a heterogeneous environment, embedded flexibility to accommodate a wide range of use cases, business and partnership models, and an architecture supporting modular network functions that can be deployed and scaled on demand. It also has to achieve seamless and consistent user experience across time and space.
Also on Tuesday, the 5GPPP (Public-Private Partnership) – a collaboration between European industry players and the European Commission – launched its own 5G vision paper [PDF] at a press conference attended by Günther Oettinger, European Commissioner for the Digital Economy and Society, and CTOs from Alcatel-Lucent, NTT DoCoMo, Ericsson, Huawei, Intel, Nokia, Orange, Samsung and Thales Alenia Space.