The first commercial version of the 5G is supposed to come out only around 2020, however, there is a lot of research, developments and positioning being done by the sector’s major industrials. The intention is obvious, to not lose the train of this new generation of wireless broadband data transmission. The 5G, when implemented, “will be a totally new reality” , because even though we are witnessing many technological advances in the current LTE networks, “there is a new world awaiting for an opportunity”, says Yang Chaobin, CMO of the Huawei wireless webs department. The Chinese giant corporation is in major outline, along with global partners, including Europeans, incentivizing research and positioning as one of the leaders in the infrastructure that the 5G will, mandatorily, have to renovate, even if it is only necessary “in most of the cases” a mix of software/hardware intervention to update the current systems. At an exclusive press conference, in the LTE World Summit 2015, that took place in Amsterdam and gathered events exclusively dedicated to 5G and the Connected Cars theme, Huawei revealed that up until 2018 it will invest around $600 M in research.
According to the Huawei paper presented in the event, “The future network will focus on the different business applications and user experience other than just the pursuit of the greater bandwidth and volume. This will raise the requirement to build service-oriented networks to quickly and efficiently respond to user needs, as well as to offer consistent and high-quality services for different use cases”.
We can also read that, from the Chinese company’s perspective, “Radio access virtualization technologies can provide the best transmit and receive conditions to users while flexible new air interface selects the best sets of air interface technologies on the wireless links. These two components together can bring the best user experience in the 5G wireless networks. The goal is to design an air interface that is adaptable to the diverse services, applications and devices of the future, scalable to support massive connectivity and massive capacity and intelligent to adapt to all the locally available spectrum.”
IoT and the 5G
It is one of the hot topics in every technology conference. The growth of the Internet of Things, the number of connected devices and the need to standardize a series of things, including the communication infrastructure. Alain Maloberti, from Orange, alerted the operators to not wait for the 5G to embrace the IoT. In his presentation, this responsible referred that all of the currently existing LTE webs can perfectly administrate in a capable way the additional traffic expected and generated by connected objects. “We have a lot more small objects like sensors and chips, so we are searching for a way to cover them effectively with the least cost possible and energy consume, with batteries that last up to 10/15 years”, he explained.
Yang Chaobin, from Huawei, thinks the same way: “the actual network can currently still suppress the needs of IoT”, he says. According to the Huawei CMO, there is no assurance, neither is it liquid, that the 5G will be the IoT’s favorite ecosystem: “it is a rather wide world, some objects may need the last generation technology and some may not be as demanding”, he assures.
So, as the world talks about 5G, the current networks continue to develop in parallel, being that the 4G is yet to achieve its maximum potential of market penetration.
And the market will only be asking for the 5G when it is urging to allure the consumer with a greater user experience, quality and speed in content delivery and, of course, bigger attractiveness in prices and QoS (Quality of Service).
