British Chancellor of the UK’s Treasury Phillip Hammond recently spoke to the potential of the upcoming 5G systems. He has even vowed to invest roughly £740 million (USD $926,000,000) into development and trials for the new advancement. Which says a lot about how current members of government and technical experts feel about the potential power of 5G – and what it could mean for the industry moving forward on a global scale.
Just from a technical perspective, 5G offers a host of improved qualities over the current 4G system. It’s even expected to exceed the power and utility of the current networks by ten – even up to a hundred – times over. It has the potential to truly revolutionize the industry within just a few years. According to Ben Timmons, the Qualcomm Senior Director of Marketing & Business Development, “5G is being categorized as a general purpose technology that will be just as important as the Internet or electricity… I believe that the industry’s approach to 5G is far more coherent than it was with previous technologies; we not only know what 5G is, but we also know what it will be made up of and the underlying technologies.”
The question then becomes how can the implementation of 5G be made more widespread – what will it take to send this new technology into every home and into every device being used? At the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona earlier this year, Qualcomm made the announcement that it will soon introduce a 5G New Radio (NR) multimode chipset solution to their assortment of modem designs – which will be compatible with the 3GPP-based 5G NR global system. According to the company, this could provide a unified 5G design that would work with almost all major spectrum bands. These kinds of developments mean a lot for the world of technology, and could help shepherd in a period where 5G provides the fastest data transfer we’ve ever seen, to the highest number of devices that’s ever been created.
Coverage maximization is also a major concern, as there are some members of the industry who believe that 5G will not be able to affect enough customers due to their different services and plans. Many cities are concerned with the necessary updates to infrastructure that would be necessary for such a development, and some rural communities are concerned that they would not be able to receive the signal strength that is necessary for 5G.
But that hasn’t stopped several vendors and mobile operators from working together to develop the means to spread 5G to customers all around the world. Many groups are taking this as a cue to begin building up their infrastructure and expanding the power and reach of towers across the glove. It also involves network slicing technology, which results in partitioning a single physical network into many virtual networks: this way, the local operator can offer different services to a number of different services – ensuring that everyone, regardless of their provider or technology, still has the same kind of access to 5G powered internet.
Source: Is industry ready for 5G?
