DEL MAR, Calif. – The next generation of wireless technology has moved past the “vision” stage and into the development and standardization phase, with emerging early products and trials coming up in 2017 and 2018, according to Matt Branda, director of technical marketing at Qualcomm.
“We’re well beyond talking about the 5G vision now, and as an industry we’re well into the development phase as well as the standardization phase of 5G,” Branda said, later adding that “5G” will not be a “rip and replace” technology that completely supplants LTE, but builds upon it with multihop capabilities to extend network access and coexist with current orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing technologies.
Branda made his remarks during a keynote address at test company Rohde & Schwarz’s 5G Innovation Summit, the predecessor to its LTE Innovation Summit, which is being held this week in California.
Branda said that based on what is beginning to coalesce in standards bodies, 5G will be “heavily OFDM based,” like LTE and Wi-Fi – not an entirely new radio interface, but an OFDM framework that is said to be more scalable and flexible to address potential and currently unknown use cases to carry the industry through 2030 and beyond. Branda highlighted three often-cited use cases for 5G: better mobile broadband, mission-critical services and massive “internet of things” deployments. Branda added that there are more than 70 potential 5G use cases in the Third Generation Partnership Project in standardization study items.
While 5G is expected to deliver high peak speeds, Branda said uniformity of coverage may actually end up being more important in order to support new services, while also delivering a lower cost per bit rate to operators so they can operate profitably. He also said data plans will have to change dramatically in order to encourage subscribers to take advantage of very high network speeds. For example, a 5G user could use up a monthly data allowance in less than two minutes in a 5G network that delivers speeds of 100 gigabits per second, Branda said.
“The way things work today is not going to work in a world where we’re delivering 100 Gbps consistently,” Branda added.
According to new estimates released today, ABI Research expects 5G services in centimeter and millimeter wave bands to provide nearly $200 billion in cumulative service revenues by 2026. LTE, LTE-Advanced and LTE-A Pro are forecast to exceed 5 billion subscriptions during the same period.
“While the global LTE subscriber base will continue to grow in the immediate future as operators evolve to LTE-A Pro networks, it will likely soften in developed markets when 5G deployments take off,” said Khin Sandi Lynn, industry analyst at ABI Research, in a statement. “In 2026, the LTE portfolio will remain the dominant mobile technology, representing more than 50% of worldwide mobile subscriptions, while the 5G subscriber base will grow to account for close to 5% of the market’s total.”
Current efforts in research and development, testing and trials are trickling into standards bodies and shaping the specification work, Branda said. In terms of Qualcomm’s 5G work, the company released its first prestandard 5G modem, the Snapdragon X50 for the 28 GHz band, earlier this year, and Branda said the company expects to see some trials in 2017, and more widespread testing in 2018, with early deployments coming that year and initial commercialization in 2019.
“5G, as we like to say, is much closer than we think,” Branda said. “This is something that’s happening now.”
Watch an interview below with Andreas Roessler, technical marketing manager for Rohde & Schwarz, on highlights from the 5G Innovation Summit this week. The one-day event is being held in both Del Mar and in Santa Clara, California.
[embedyt] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l7T0VhTAcx0[/embedyt]
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