Monday 1 July 2013

Is it too early to talk '5G'


While LTE/LTE-A (or 4G) is being rolled out, there is already a talk about 5G. Last week in the LTE World Summit in Amsterdam, there was a whole track on what should 5G be without much technical details. Couple of months back Samsung had announced that they have reached 5G breakthrough. In my talk back in May, I had suggested that 5G would be an evolution on the Radio Access but the core will evolve just little. Anyway, its too early to speculate what the access technology for 5G would be.

Ericsson has published a '5G' whitepaper where they talk about the vision and why and what of 5G rather than going into any technical details. It is embedded below:


1 comment:

Dimitris Mavrakis said...

Zahid,
it seems that a new air interface is being discussed, one specifically suited to small cells and hetnets. A new air interface is perhaps the most important aspect of 5G and there is a heated discussion happening in academia what this will be.

As far as I can tell, there are two promiment examples:
Non Orthogonal Multiple Access (NOMA) and
Filter Bank Multi Carrier (FBMC).

The vision is that these air interfaces will be commercially ready during 2020, but it may be later. Looks like they will require substantial network upgrades as well...

Dimitris.