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5G Adoption Next 5 Years Critical to Increasingly Connected World, Japanese Official Says

Industry will need to move to 5G in the next five years or so to deal with rapid expansion in data demands on wireless networks, said Norimasa Sugiura, an official at Japan’s National Institute of Information and Communication Technology. Sugiura spoke Wednesday at a Wireless Telecommunications Association policy workshop at the Georgetown University McDonough School of Business. His institute is an agency of the Japanese government.

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We don’t know what 5G is right now,” Sugiura said. “That is our biggest challenge.” Regulators also don’t know for sure how much bandwidth will be needed for data or how effective sharing will be, he said. 5G is “just a way of simply saying that we need more,” he said. Sugiura cited the growth in wearable devices and in the Internet of Things. The primary ways to make spectrum use more efficient are to pack both more data and users into spectrum already available for broadband and spectrum sharing, he said.

Michael Thelander, CEO of Signals Research Group, said the U.S. is falling behind places like South Korea in wireless broadband. Demographics is the issue, he said. “Seoul is the fourth mostly densely populated city in the world,” he said. “People have a hungry appetite for mobile broadband. There’s a cell tower in every single building.” Compared with Seoul, “we’re never going to get there,” he said.

The LTE standard continues to change, Thelander noted. “5G is not going to be a standard,” he said. “It’s going to be a series of standards that evolve over time.” Release 10 of the LTE standard was essentially LTE-Advanced, and Release 12, with further refinements, is scheduled to be released next year, he said. Release 14 “potentially that could be what people call 5G,” he said. “There are lots of great ideas out there for what 5G is. Some of them will get into Release 14.”

LTE is really just the long-term evolution of 3G, said Berge Ayvazian, senior analyst at Wireless 20/20. “It wasn’t a new technology. It wasn’t even a whole new generation.” At some point, marketing takes over and someone will say, “This is the place at which we can start claiming a magnitude difference in performance,” he said. Someone will claim, “I have the first 5G network,” Ayvazian said. “Everyone is going to have to chase my tail in order to keep up with that claim and that’s how [5G] is going to happen.”

The lesson every year from CES is that innovative services and products “are going to keep coming” and spectrum is critical, said Julie Kearney, CEA vice president–regulatory affairs. “We know the innovation is not going to stop.”

In China, “smart” chopsticks tell users whether food has been contaminated, Kearney said. Other people are using smart dog collars to track the movement of dogs or smart onesies to monitor infants in their cribs, she said. The FCC and the administration are doing a good job of making more spectrum available, Kearney said. “We have a lot going on,” she said, “We have a lot of momentum.” Figuring out how much spectrum will be needed in the future and its source is only “prudent planning,” she said. One concern is avoiding “government overreach” and over-regulation, she said.

Densification, increases in capability and increased adaptability of networks are among the big trends for the future, predicted Doug Brake, telecommunications policy analyst at the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation. “We’re going to have wide diversity of demands on networks -- different applications will have wildly different needs in terms of bandwidth, latency.” The huge increase in the number of things that are connected “will require extreme scalability in signaling within the network,” Brake said. There will also be an increase in latency-sensitive, real-time applications, he predicted. He said with 5G, “we’re talking about a sort of collection of different technologies that will represent a big change in the network,” he said. Rollout of 4G was mostly a matter of “realigning the networks to be used for mobile broadband data instead of voice,” he said. “Now we’re talking about the Internet of Things.”

There is no clean spectrum, noted Michael Ha, with the FCC Office of Engineering and Technology. “Everything is occupied.” High-frequency spectrum likely will play a role in 5G, he predicted. Ha gave a presentation on the FCC’s recent notice of inquiry on the use of spectrum bands at 24 GHz and above. “None of these bands are clean and we’re going to have to have some type of sharing,” he said. The discussion will become more active after the FCC starts to receive comments in December, Ha said.