Cristiano Amon, EVP and President of Qualcomm, sees a correlation between investments in 4G and the development of new successful business models and stresses the need for a structured path to 5G. He paints a very clear picture of what 5G can bring us: “Ultra-reliable, ultra-low latency communication between self-driving cars, sensors that add intelligence to city infrastructure, multi-gigabit per second mobile broadband speeds and applications we can’t even imagine yet.” He points out that people will expects every single device to have HDTV (High-definition television)

functionality as well as VR (Virtual Reality) and augmented reality services.

 

 

Changing industries

 

Cristiano Amon sees Gigabit LTE as the foundation of new 5G applications and a vital enabler for Cloud and automotive developments: “Gigabit LTE, designed to deliver fibre-optic Internet speeds wirelessly, is giving us the first real glimpse into our 5G future.” Gigabit LTE can offer ultrafast speeds over wide geographic areas, making it a good choice as a coverage layer which will provide a consistent 5G experience.”

 

“Entire industries will change as data speeds go up and data costs come down,” adds Qualcomm CEO Steve Mollenkop. “Our homes, cars, cities, manufacturing and healthcare will become more intelligent, more automated and interconnected.” To meet the increasing complexity brought by 5G and a rapidly growing number of devices, Qualcomm and TDK corp have invested heavily in developing RF front-end modules and filters for mobile devices, automotive systems and Internet of Things applications. Other focus points include developing a unified 5G design for all spectrum types and bands and ensuring connectivity works simultaneously across WiFi, 4G and 5G and using mmWave technology for ‘mobile broadband.’ The company has also carried out successful tests with the 3GPP New Radio (NR) work, which it expects to become the global 5G standard. Qualcomm, Ericsson, NTT, DoCoMo, Vodafone and Telstra Australia are jointly working on 5G NR trials.

 

 

New forms of cooperation

 

"We are entering into a whole new market, connecting new things,” says Ericsson’s President and CEO Börje Ekholm. ““5G will be built in an entirely different way than 4G. Functionality and even networks will be cloud-based in the future. This requires us to enter into new partnerships, new collaboration and new business models. Today, we have more than 30 Memorandums of Understanding with operators around the world to work on 5G.”  Ericsson are looking far beyond expansion of familiar 4G based services, and looking at 5G as the key foundation to enable the automation and business transformation needed for the Internet of Things, as well as data-hungry innovations like Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality, AI and machine learning. Börje Ekholm adds: “We are only at the beginning of the mobility journey. In coming years we will see massive transformations across industries as 5G is introduced.”

 

Besides involvement from the tech sector, telco’s, governments, opinion leaders and special interest groups are also essential to 5G’s success. Wireless infrastructure required a well-specified wired backbone, scaled to suit wireless connection speeds. This ensure available bandwidth isn’t ‘diluted’ to the point of becoming unusable when large numbers of users or systems need to access it simultaneously. Without ubiquitous fibre coverage, the effectiveness and potential of 5G networks will be severaly limited. As Günther H. Oettinger, European Commissioner for Digital Economy and Society says: “We need to take a close look at the necessary framework conditions and incentives that can lead to the deployment of the underlying network infrastructures. And we need to make sure that there will be industrial players ready to invest in 5G services.”