5G, Fiber Seen as Key to Interconnected World on Display at CES

Devices are “driving usage,” said Heather Gold, president of the FTTH Council. Gold said she has a question she likes to pose to builders of smart homes: “How do you plan to sell this house if the consumers can’t use it?” Their response, she said, is “this look like deer in the headlights. You need to think about promoting more fiber to the home.”

The Kansas City area, with its Google fiber build-out, found a FTTH take rate that far exceeded expectations, said Joe Reardon, attorney at McAnany, Van Cleave and former mayor of Kansas City, Kansas. “It’s economic development, it’s quality of life,” Reardon said. More states are “seeing the validity” of fiber as “an important infrastructure investment,” he said.

One of the big takeaways from Kansas City is that consumers were ready for FTTH, Reardon said. Lots of people had the same experience before they got fiber, he said. They bought a Roku box and brought it home “and they couldn’t deliver Netflix in a way that made it a good experience,” he said. Communities also are finding that houses have higher resale value if they have FTTH, he said.

Kevin Morgan of Adtran, chairman of the FTTH Council, said that without broad Internet connections people don’t have a good experience with the new smart devices. “The demand for bandwidth is infinite, it really is,” he said. Morgan said people posted a trillion photos on the Internet in 2014, but posting video, with its significantly higher bandwidth demands, is starting to supplant posting photos for many consumers.

LTE and WiMAX also have a big role to play in making new smart devices usable by consumers, said speakers at a second panel at the broadband conference, sponsored by Mobile Future.

Mobile Future Chairman Jonathan Spalter said the first 4G LTE network didn’t appear until 2011. By the end of that year there were some 50 4G networks globally and today more than 206 LTE networks are in 79 countries, he said. The next wave is 5G, he said. The 5G concept is still “murky,” with details yet to be revealed, but what the 5G networks offer is “mind-boggling,” Spalter said.

Once the worldwide network is implemented across the globe, carriers say it will have space for more than 7 trillion interconnected devices just in the coming decade, Spalter said. “Each individual globally will have at least 10 connections, including smartphones, tablets and smart appliances, many of which we’re going to be able to see out on the [CES] floor within the next couple of days.” Over the next five to 10 years, billions of devices “with much less predictable traffic patterns” will emerge, including a “limitless range of machine-to-machine modules,” he said. The 5G networks promise mobile data rates of multiple Gbps, increased spectral efficiency, increased reliability, a “dramatic decrease in power consumption,” latencies of less than 5 milliseconds end-to-end and the capacity for networks to serve a “significantly larger” number of devices, he said. “It’s a daunting list,” he said. “There are a lot of very significant first order questions that must be addressed and tackled, including how much will it cost to build.” The good news is “it’s all doable and it’s coming,” he said.

Ulf Ewaldsson, senior vice president at Ericsson, said the huge number of devices on display at CES highlights the importance of better broadband connections. “It’s very obvious that anything that is shown out here almost always benefits from having connections,” he said. “The demand is now coming from the outside on the industry, on the software layers, on the applications industry,” he said. Getting to 5G will take a global push, he said. “Industry collaboration is very important.”

Collaboration is critical, agreed John Godfrey, vice president-government and public affairs at Samsung Information Systems America. Industry is aiming at a hundredfold increase in network capacity for 5G over 4G, which is comparable to the “leap” 4G provided over 3G, he said. “When the world moved from 2 to 3G and 3 to 4G, people asked what are you going to do with all that capacity,” he said. “We found a way to use it.” Some of the technologies are already being incorporated into 4G-Advanced on the way to 5G, he said. “It’s things like multiple-input, multiple-output antenna arrays on base stations and in the handsets. It’s things like flatter network architectures, moving towards virtual cells.”

High frequency spectrum will play a key role, Godfrey said. In October, the FCC launched a notice of inquiry on new developments in technology that could increase the viability of operations in bands above 24 GHz (see 1410170048). “To get very high data rates, like 50 Gbps, you have to go where the spectrum is,” he said. Samsung has been doing lots of research in particular on the future use of the 28 and 39 GHz bands, he said.

“We need to think about 5G now because of what’s coming in the future,” Jeff Campbell, Cisco vice president-global government affairs, said. IP traffic is expected to grow threefold between 2013 and 2018 and elevenfold for mobile data, he said. In 2013, mobile traffic was about 1 percent of all IP traffic, he added. By 2018, that will grow to 11 percent, Cisco predicts, Campbell said. “That is totally new and a different way of looking at things going forward.”