Despite challenges, 5G wireless could arrive by 2020

Though all the possibilities that 4G wireless technology presents still haven’t been fully explored, industry experts gathered in Ottawa on Wednesday to look ahead at the next generation of wireless networks and discuss what 5G mobility will be like. The commercial availability of 5G networks is expected around 2020, Wen Tong, an Ottawa-based fellow with Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd., said at the 5G@Canada Roundtable, organized by the global Chinese telecom company. 5G would deliver peak data rates about 100 times faster than current 4G networks, Huawei said in a release. “This is a generation of mobile technology and networking and applications that will be everything in what we see in telecommunications and the IT industries,” Tong said in his opening remarks. “It’s going to combine and merge together and show up with a very different scenario and landscape for our work and our lives.” 5G will have a massive capacity to provide fibre-network-type speed on wireless networks, he said. It will also go far beyond connections between people and involve automated connections between machines, gadgets and consumer products, he said, adding that this will involve hundreds of billions of connections—perhaps a trillion by 2030. Tong also predicted the technology will adapt to treat different bandwidths, whether cellular, WiFi or on different spectrums, in the same way, so that any device can work on whatever service is available and transitions are seamless from the user’s point of view. He added Huawei will invest $600 million US into research and development of 5G technology between now and 2018. A company press release said that by the end of this year, it will have contributed more than $2 million to Canadian universities for this kind of research. There are also challenges standing in the way of achieving this kind of level of technological advancement and making it something people will use, the participants in the roundtable outlined. For one, carriers’ business models will have to adjust. Tong said that with such a massive amount of data being transferred, a volume of data that costs a consumer $60 today would have to be reduced to something in the range of mere cents for people and businesses to adopt this next generation of wireless technology. During a panel discussion, Theodore Rappaport, a professor of computer engineering at the Polytechnic Institute of New York University, said massive amounts of additional spectrum will need to be made available in order for 5G to achieve its potential. “We’ve gone from modem speeds that were dial-up at 300 bits per second to now many dozens of megabits per second,” he said. “You look at everything in the consumer-electronics world in the last 40 years, and you’ve seen five or six orders of magnitude of increase, and yet wireless has lost out on this scale in one fundamental way. And that is in the history of wireless over the last 40 years, our carrier frequencies have only gone up from 900 MHz to two or three GHz, or five GHz if you count WiFi.” Rappaport added that as much as it will be a challenge to convince regulators to open up the spectrum needed to run 5G networks, a bigger issue will be whether wireless carriers sense the market demand for these advanced capabilities and make the investments needed. Panelists cited numerous other challenges, from spectrum capacity to the capabilities of networks and phones, to achieving operational 5G networks in the years ahead. “A huge number of machines is going to add a lot of stress on the system,” Ivo Maljevic, a senior design specialist with Telus Corp., said. “There will be a lot of signalling that networks are simply not designed to cope with. So that is something we are hoping the technology will be able to provide the answers (for) before we can provide the technology. But we are looking into these problems … but there’s a lot of technology problems.” Even what the 5G technology will ultimately look like when it becomes available is still unclear, Rappaport said. “We’re using the term 5G like we know what it is,” he said. “We don’t know what it is. No one in this room really knows what 5G is. We all have our view of the elephant. One part of the elephant is 5G to some of us; for some it’s low latency, for some it’s millimetre wave, for some it’s self-organizing networks.” Nonetheless, he said: “I think it’s exciting that we’re starting to have a dialogue about what’s next in wireless.” When 5G networks become reality, they will also bring about changes in everyday life, the participants said. Rappaport said he can envision the students he teaches not having to carry around heavy backpacks to classes, but rather having portable devices that can download any textbook or assignment they need within a fraction of a second in what he termed an “information shower.” Alberto Leon-Garcia, a professor of computer engineering at the University of Toronto, talked about what he said would be an age of “smart infrastructure.” He said 5G networks would allow for “smart-grid transportation,” and give machinery “the ability to sense the environment and to affect consumer behaviour in a feedback type of mechanism that’s enabled by the types of technology we’re talking about.” — With reporting by Derek Abma at dabma@thewirereport.ca and editing from Anja Karadeglija at akarad@thewirereport.ca.

Despite challenges, 5G wireless could arrive by 2020

News | November 13, 2013

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Despite challenges, 5G wireless could arrive by 2020

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