Industry Expert Blogs

After wrapping up the week at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, one thing has become clear—5G is on everyone’s mind and the race to develop enabling technologies to make 5G a reality in the next 5 years is underway. During the conference, in between meetings and demos, I was able to tour the halls and view a series of 5G technologies, innovations and use cases which not only make 5G more real but exploit the promises that 5G will bring, namely low latency, high data rates, on-the-go connectivity, high user density, and highly reliable and secure communications.

Touring the tradeshow floor it felt as though the possibilities were endless for the fifth generation of mobile networks. Cellular carriers and WiFi companies were spotlighting their 5G solutions and a whole range of chipset offerings for the Internet of Things (IoT) proving that, although convergence on a common 5G specification is still some years away, we’ve reached the stage where the pipeline of 5G applications is well ahead of the standard, thus creating new business models and use cases. Many of the use cases leveraged technologies such as virtual reality, location awareness services, and push advertising addressing applications like real-time gaming to autonomous vehicles, just to name a few. And, the recent announcements from US telecoms to test 5G networks in “real-world” conditions mark the official entry into the 5G race. Many experts used the 2018 Olympics in Seoul as a proof point for 5G infrastructure deployment, with media and communications to fully exercise the network. One memorable moment of the show was during the panel keynote when Ericsson CEO Hans Vestberg pulled a multi-element steerable phased array radio front end plus antenna out of his pocket. No larger than a deck of cards, Vestberg explained that three of these would make up a three-sector 5G base station to support multi-GBps data rates in a massive MIMO environment.

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