CES Closes With More Talk of 5G, Touted as Tech That Will Work 'Out of the Box'
LAS VEGAS -- On a final 5G panel at CES, speakers discussed advantages of the next generation of wireless. Verizon and AT&T already have launched 5G in some markets, with T-Mobile and Sprint scheduled to do so as well. Speakers repeatedly said Thursday they had never seen as much focus on a single topic at a CES as they saw on 5G.
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Fifth-generation wireless will create lots of uses because of the low latency, from autonomous vehicles to mobile health to manufacturing, said Joe Mosele, AT&T vice president-business development. In the IoT space, it's significant that 5G equipment “will work right out of the box,” he said. “The ability to compute at the edge is going to open up a lot more innovation, innovation that we’re not even contemplating,” Mosele said. What 5G ends up looking like will be defined by the user and that will take some time, he said.
Chief Technology Officer Derek Peterson said 5G is important to Boingo, which builds networks at airports, sports stadiums and other venues. “It allows us to have more technology to bring into a venue, to be able to solve a lot of the use cases that sometimes are challenging.” Peterson said on some levels, 5G is mostly a marketing term. “It means really just trying to get all the different things working together,” he said. LTE and LTE-advanced will be around for a while and will get additional improvements, he said. “I think you’re going to see growth continuing in 4G,” he said: “What we’re all hoping for is this really connected 5G experience.”
Steven Hummel, CTA senior research analyst, said the discussions at CES only scratch the surface of the potential benefits of 5G. For the first time in the history of the wireless industry, “a technology standard is ahead of schedule and the focus isn’t on voice or messaging, but rather an extremely high and ultra-reliable networks focused on high-fidelity applications across multiple use cases in a number of different industries,” he said.
CTA forecasts 2.1 million 5G-capable handsets and 1.5 million 5G gateways will be put into use this year, Hummel said.
Some devices on the network are still 2G, said Stephanie Atkinson, CEO of Compass Intelligence. She predicted the biggest difference will be that 5G is focused on industrial applications and massive IoT “and really changing the customer experience.” All carriers will have a different definition of what 5G means, she said.