Surfin' 5G Gangnam Style

An article by Claudia Nemat, Member of the Board of Management responsible for Europe and Technology

One song was enough to give South Korea a remarkable increase in tourism and to turn its foreign trade balance positive in 2012. At least that is the aftermath of the incredible success of PSY’s song “Gangnam style“ parodizing the worldwide known, posh quarter of Seoul. However, this buzzing region of Asia is not only relying on songwriters to make their country grow. Last month South Korea announced a 1.6 trillion ₩ ($1.5 billion) plan to roll out a next-generation 5G wireless service. Full-length films might be downloaded within a second. The roadmap foresees a trial service in 2017 and a fully commercial 5G service being available by December 2020.

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Yes, we are speaking about 5G - the next mobile Internet standard. It will surely be one of the most trendy topics during the upcoming Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. If LTE and LTE Advanced are already fast, 5G gives another dimension of speed. It might give more than a fibre network feeling to smartphones. Of course, a lot of questions are still unanswered. There are no defined sets of standards yet.

Until now 4G tech has only reached some groups of the consumers. Nevertheless, the gold rush for the Next Generation has already started. It is about setting the standards for 5G speeds. States and companies are already deep diving into it.

Many companies claimed that 5G technology will be in place by 2020. If you look at the development of technology, that prediction seems reasonable. Up to now roughly every 10 years new mobile generation was introduced. Let’s take a quick look at statistics: 1981 brought the first 1G system, eleven years later 2G appeared. The year 2001 stands as a beginning of 3G roll out, while over a decade later 4G systems were already fully compliant with IMT Advanced. For pea counters, yes pre-4G systems in fact appeared earlier, nevertheless there is certain logic we will see 5G in 2020 plus/minus x.

But there is an important aspect beyond access speed: Advanced access technology in mobile means also more traffic within the backbone networks – so our industry needs to invest not only in access technology but also in new backbone architecture: Otherwise the 5G-Ferrari can only drive snail pace. Currently the telecommunication operators in Europe are sandwiched between auctions and regulation that drain our cash and future technology challenges that will need cash for the invest to roll out. Right now, Europe needs to speed up. Especially Asian nations are very keen on setting the next worldwide mobile standard. Asia has understood the decisive impact mobile technology will have in the future:

Today there are 1.2 billion mobile broadband users. This figure is growing by hundreds of millions each year. We will see an enormous increase of (HD-) video-based service usage. Already now LTE-users have a much higher usage than 3G-consumers. The usage of cloud-based applications will also keep growing. Moreover, there is another source for the further expansion of mobile broadband traffic: The paradigm shift from human-centric to human & machine-centric systems. Some may be surprised but in fact fridges or ovens with an IP addresses are already on the market.

Various studies show that the number of devices connected to Internet is expected to increase from 5 bn. in 2010 to 50 bn. in 2020, mainly because of massive machine-to-machine communication introduction. We should not miss that trend; like it or not, it is the next Gangnam Style in mobile technology.