The future of 5G mobile networks: support and development

Partnerships for 5G success

Mansoor Hanif, director of converged networks and innovation at BT – which already plays a huge part in funding networking innovation through such means as national competitions, startup incubators, and in-house at its Adastral Park R&D centre in Suffolk – says there are a number of things his organisation needs to do better to kickstart 5G innovation in the UK.

“The missing element is venture capitalists [VCs]. We have a lot of money for investment in the UK, and most of these VCs are university spin-offs that want guidance and a path to market, so we need to be more open and spur them to fund more research,” says Hanif.

Kester Mann, CCS Insight principal analyst for operators, says cross-industry partnerships will be the best approach to innovating and building out 5G.

“I would like to see more engagement with vertical sectors and parallel industries. We hear so much about opportunities for 5G in healthcare, transport and so on, so maybe we could see more partnerships with companies outside the telecoms bubble,” he says.

UK government backs 5G, but is it deluding itself?

In the past 12 months, the UK government has committed repeatedly and extravagantly to 5G, publishing a number of strategic plans and launching several tests and trials in an attempt to secure UK leadership in 5G – or at least a semblance of leadership, given Japan and South Korea will inevitably be the true global leaders.

In its most recent update, published in December 2017, it issued a “call for views” on two pilot 5G schemes – one an urban network to demonstrate smart city technology, and the other a rural deployment to explore internet of things (IoT) use cases in agriculture, remote healthcare, and so on.

Analysys Mason senior researcher Caroline Gabriel says there has been an element of drum-beating over 5G from the government, although she stresses this is not to discount the valuable work done by the many up-and-running 5G projects.

“What is more important is [whether] the government is going to put regulations and frameworks in place to allow 5G to deliver benefits to the UK as an economy and a society? It’s all fine words, but I see very little concrete in terms of new spectrum approaches and frameworks to let industry communicate its requirements,” she says.

“It would be a waste if 5G wasn’t transformative. It is important that everyone is involved, and the government really puts effort into understanding that this is a very different technology so we need to use it in a different way, otherwise we might just as well improve what we already have.”

What will happen at MWC?

Undoubtedly, Mobile World Congress (MWC) 2018 in Barcelona, which opens 26 February, will move the 5G conversation on a few more steps. But with such a wide variety of activity going on, and so many urgent challenges to address, what will top the agenda?

Insight’s Mann says the impact of the Winter Olympics in South Korea cannot be underestimated, even if only as a means to get people thinking about 5G through a good sports technology story.

“The Olympics finishes the day before MWC starts, so given the participation in the games by the likes of Intel and Samsung, we will hear a lot about it and will get a better idea of some of the early consumer use cases, such as virtual and augmented reality,” he says. “There will be a real-life twist to MWC that we haven’t seen in previous years.

But apart from that, he is less optimistic about anything cutting through the noise. “To be honest it could be more of the same, there’ll be an awful lot of hype, it might feel like everyone there has a 5G story of some description and cutting through that will be a challenge,” he says.

“Will we be any further down line in terms of business models and use cases? I suspect not.”

Pragmatism reigns?

At wireless infrastructure supplier CommScope, Phil Sorsky, vice-president of international service providers, is hoping a more pragmatic attitude to 5G will prevail this year, as the industry works out what will be genuinely possible.

“We’ll see suppliers and operators alike demonstrating the extent to which they’re now ready to maximise their network investments and build a bridge to Next-generation technologies,” he says.

He points to developments such as new antenna models that support 4x4 MIMO, advanced modulation and carrier aggregation of unlicensed spectrum that will help progress to gigabit long term evolution (LTE), a stepping-stone along the way to 5G.

Sorsky also predicts developments in the centralised baseband processing and virtualised network functions on which 5G networks will be built.

“We should also expect a surprisingly green theme this year, as 5G is the first wireless technology designed with targets for both spectral and energy efficiency. The GSMA has a goal of reducing the sector’s total global greenhouse gas emissions per connection by 40% by 2020,” says Sorsky.

“Given the speed and amount of data 5G is expected to carry, finding a way to construct an energy-efficient, environmentally friendly ecosystem will be a major challenge, and also an opportunity.”

Analysys Mason’s Gabriel says MWC may well help establish links between 5G and new networking technologies such as network automation, which is not specifically related to 5G.

“Automation will be the big thing this year, using artificial intelligence [AI] and zero-touch networking. In the context of 5G, that will be very important to the economics,” she says.

Analysys Mason’s studies have consistently shown that MNOs seem to want 5G networks to be between a third and half the cost of 4G networks to run, says Gabriel.

“5G has to be much cheaper, and one way to achieve that will be to make it automated,” she adds.

Jim Benson, mobile product marketing director at Juniper Networks, also takes the view that underlying network technologies as a 5G enabler will be high on the MWC agenda in 2018.

”5G architecture must fully embrace interoperable network functions virtualisation [NFV] and SDN technologies for the elasticity to scale and deploy network functions on demand and with reduced risk,” says Benson.

“Expect for the debate to move swiftly to 5G’s relationship with the IoT and AI. While the new network has a lot of hype to live up to, exhibitors and visitors alike will also be analysing the true potential of an incoming 5G IoT-ready world, where the prospect of a smart city finally becomes a reality,” he says.

Vested interests

EE network communications manager Howard Jones predicts an awful lot of noise from the supplier community this year. “They have a greater vested interest in 5G happening than the operators,” he says.

“We [operators] know we need to keep up from a capacity perspective and we know we need to build an infrastructure that brings the best of fixed and mobile into a converged network architecture, but the noise and pressure to back that is being driven by the supplier community for whom it is the next opportunity to drive revenues.

“The pressure on that community is to focus on use cases and to start to show how 5G can make a difference to people, and how operators can get a return on investment.”