What is 5G ?

It is a mobile broadband system that will provide higher performance than is available today’s most advanced 4G networks.  These performance improvements will be measurable in terms of speed, latency, reliability, scale and openness.  The 5G system will achieve this higher performance by integrating many new devices over multiple wireless technologies with new management and orchestration systems.  A 5G system will include existing and new technologies such as: LTE, new radio technology, highly variable end devices especially for M2M, virtualized software and management and orchestration systems.  There will be a single global 5G standard to ensure global coverage.  It will be deployed in commercial service by 2020, but components may be ready earlier. 

The main focus is now on research where evolution of existing technologies is on-going in parallel with innovation of new technologies. A lot of research is done in cooperation with universities and partners. By join forces, we can together understand the new use cases and the new requirements that will be put on 5G.

Pre-standardization and technology development will be on-going until 2017. Standardization activities to set the requirements and make 5G a global standard starts at 2017. In parallel, trials and test systems will be up and running. First commercial system will most likely be deployed by 2020.

   Requirements on 5G

The exact performance levels and requirements that systems and equipment will need to meet to label themselves 5G are yet to be defined by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU). This will take place somewhere around 2016-2018.

At this stage, we are using expectations levels that where set in the METIS project*). These expectations are: 

·         Handle 1000 times the mobile data traffic of today

·         Billions of connected devices

·         100 times user data rates

·         Latency reduced by up to a factor of 5

·         10 times the battery life

·         Different devices: from mobiles, tablets and wearables, to cars, trucks, bikes, cereal packets… anything

·         Data integrity