5G will have to do more than just speed up your phone, Ericsson says
For consumers looking
forward to 5G mobile technology for super-high speed, network giant
Ericsson says there will be more to it than that—and less.
More so than any previous
generation of cellular gear, 5G will have to serve two masters, Nandlall
said. With wireless sensors, industrial equipment, and an array of
consumer gadgets, in a few years there are likely to be 10 mobile
connections per person. If 5 billion humans join the mobile world,
that’s 50 billion connections that 5G networks will need to serve.
Not all of those devices
will be hungry for megabits per second, Nandlall said. For example,
remote sensors may need slow connections to achieve decades of battery
life, while other pieces of the so-called Internet of Things may have to
have much higher reliability than consumers get when they’re just
making phone calls.
“Every now and then, those
calls drop, and that’s probably not something that we want if I’m
putting an industrial application on it,” Nandlall said. For example, a
device that turns the floodgates on a dam had better work correctly and
at the right time, he said.
5G flexibility
Bandwidth-hungry consumers
won’t get left behind, Nandlall said: As the next major step in the
standards process, 5G should deliver 10 times the speed of 4G, putting a
theoretical maximum of 10Gbps (bits per second) on the books. But with
many more uses of wireless emerging, service providers may carve up
their 5G networks and dedicate only part of that capacity to what we
think of today as the mobile Internet, he said.
In an example of
software’s growing role in networks, 5G should be flexible enough that
carriers can reprogram and reconfigure their networks to accommodate
different applications, according to Nandlall.
“Those will actually get
different slices of the network with different technologies,” including
modulation schemes and levels of capacity, Nandlall said. He compared
the future architecture to cloud computing with multiple tenants each
running their own applications.
Meanwhile, 4G will coexist
with 5G, along with Wi-Fi and other technologies, which may include a
future lightweight protocol specially designed for machine-to-machine
communications, he said.
By moving to 5G, carriers
should be able to keep cutting the price of mobile data, Nandlall said.
Most consumers haven’t recognized falling prices because their
consumption continues to rise, he said. Network efficiencies have
slashed the cost of delivering a megabyte of data by about 50 percent
per year, from about 46 cents in 2008 to between 1 cent and 3 cents now.
That hasn’t lowered subscribers’ bills at the end of the month because
average data consumption has been doubling or more each year, he said.
Those looking at
requirements for future 5G networks want them to be able to support 50GB
of data consumption per subscriber, per month.
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