Half-year sales up 30%, with enterprise and smartphones the main drivers, though Chinese 4G projects also strong contributors
Huawei had three important boasts to make as it announced its results for the first half of fiscal 2015 - it turned in its highest year-on-year sales growth for five years; it is reportedly well on track to hits its target of 100m smartphone shipments this year; and it achieved an operating margin of 20%, more than twice that of its close rivals.
For the first half, Huawei reported revenues up 30% year-on-year to CNY175.9bn ($28.3bn) and said it would achieve "effective growth" in 2015. This is its highest rate of growth since it started reporting interim results in 2011. Its highest annual growth rate in recent years was in 2008, when its full year revenues were up by 33%.
Carrier infrastructure accounts for two-thirds of Huawei's revenues, making Ericsson, Nokia and Alcatel-Lucent its chief competitors - and like its Swedish arch-rival, it will be waiting to see whether the merger of the other two players will create a more difficult competitive environment, or whether it can benefit from a period of disruption and adjustment.
However, the Chinese company has a different pattern of revenues to those rivals, and a more complex competitive landscape. One, it has a stronger focus on the enterprise, which appeared to be the star of the first two quarters. Huawei does not break out the different operations until its full year report, but its CFO Meng Wanzhou said the enterprise segment had "started to experience accelerated growth", while she was more cautious about the carrier business, just saying it had enjoyed "steady growth". She highlighted cloud computing, storage, agile networks and smart cities as strong performers. In its enterprise segment, of course, Huawei competes aggressively with Cisco.
Two, it still has a major devices business, something all its wireless network peers, most recently Nokia, have now abandoned (though the Finnish firm may return to the fray indirectly through its licensing business). This embroils Huawei in the cut-throat price war for the saturating smartphone space, taking on Samsung and Apple, and a group of its compatriots, such as Lenovo, Xiaomi and ZTE.
According to an internal memo seen by Reuters, Huawei is ahead of schedule in reaching its target of 100m shipments this year. In recent years, the company fallen short of its stated goals for handsets - for instance, for 2014 it set a target of 80m units, but shipped 75m. However, its ability to predict its market and control its supply chain has improved, and so its forecasting has become steadily more accurate - while it was 5m units off in 2014, that was far better than a shortfall of 28m in 2012, when Huawei had predicted up to 60m smartphones but actually shipped 32m.
This year, it looks like getting it right, according to Richard Yu, head of the consumer business unit, who wrote in the memo that Huawei had shipped more than 10m units every month since May. According to Gartner estimates, Huawei was fourth largest smartphone vendor in the first quarter with 18.1m shipments and 5.4% share (Samsung, Apple and Lenovo were ahead of it). That figure would not set Huawei up for its 100m target, but Yu's memo suggests shipments have picked up dramatically in the second quarter, and that Huawei can boost its growth further in the second half. Meng said in her results statement that the midrange Mate7 and high end P8 models had performed particularly well, as well as the Honor family.
The third difference from Huawei's key rivals is, of course, regional. It is virtually excluded from selling critical infrastructure in the US, and some other major economies, such as India, have also raised the bar for purchasing from Chinese firms, officially on grounds of national security. So while north America is Ericsson's largest market, and Nokia CEO Rajeev Suri said this week that a stronger US presence would be one of the biggest benefits of buying ALU, Huawei hardly plays there (except in handsets, where it is launching a big offensive this year and is aiming for a top three market ranking in a couple of years' time).
The lack of US presence is offset by strength in its homeland, where major 4G roll-outs are underway. Meng said of the carrier business unit: "Investment continued to pour into 4G network construction in China. In addition, the growth in global data traffic drives investment in network capacity expansion, while carriers' digital transformation pushes up investment in the ICT industry. These factors helped us maintain steady growth in the carrier business."
Since western vendors are able to compete more effectively in China than Huawei can in the US, it needs additional markets and has invested heavily in European customers and R&D, as well as pulling ahead of its competitors in some emerging economies, particularly in Africa and south east Asia.
Huawei also reported an operating margin of 18%, down slightly from 18.3% in the year-ago period but up on the full year 2014 figure of 11.9%. The second half of last year was hit by high marketing and R&D costs, analysts said, but it remains to be seen whether a similar pattern affects 2015. Margins are very healthy for this market - by contrast, Ericsson's operating margin for Q215 was 5.9%, while Nokia's for Q115 was 8.3% and ALU's was 2.5%.
"We are confident that we will maintain effective growth and steady and healthy development in all business segments in 2015," Meng summed up, though she did not offer specific guidance. It is likely that the smaller units will be the main drivers of that expansion. The enterprise and consumer businesses experienced faster growth than the carrier unit in 2014, increasing sales by 27.3% and 32.6% respectively.
Rethink Wireless is a sample of our full paid service Wireless Watch, click the link below for 4 week FREE trial. Wireless Watch Trial
The European Commission is putting money behind its determination to recapture mobile industry leadership for its own companies in the 5G era. A series of R&D initiatives have recently announced their roadmaps, addressing different aspects of future wireless platforms with the help of EC funds and regional expertise. While many are led by the local giants - Ericsson, Nokia and Alcatel-Lucent/Bell Labs - there are leading roles for external partners too, as seen in Samsung's leadership of the mmMagic consortium.
This is co-funded by the EC's 5G PPP program and is focused on developing technologies which can operate in high frequency bands, from 6 GHz right up to 100 GHz. The aim is to gain deeper understanding of what is realistic in using these promising but often untried areas of the spectrum, and to accelerate standardization of millimetre wave systems.
There are many differences of opinion among mobile players over how important millimeter wave bands will be in delivering additional spectrum capacity for 5G. While some bands, notably 60 GHz, are already in commercial use, the behavior of others has hardly been tested, and some CTOs believe the primary focus should be on squeezing more capacity out of the well understood frequencies below 6 GHz.
Samsung, however, has been a major proponent of moving up the spectrum and has already demonstrated experimental networks which deliver very high speeds in bands such as 30 GHz and 60 GHz. In mmMagic, it is joined by most of its main infrastructure rivals - Ericsson, Alcatel-Lucent, Huawei and Nokia - as well as Intel, Orange, Telefonica and Qamcom; test vendors Keysight and Rohde & Schwarz; and academic partners (Fraunhofer HHI, CEA LETI and IMDEA Networks; universities in Aalto, Bristol, Chalmers and Dresden). mmMAGIC is led and coordinated by Samsung. Ericsson acts as technical manager while Intel, Fraunhofer HHI, Nokia, Huawei and Samsung will each lead one of the five technical work packages.
Chang Yeong Kim, head of digital multimedia and communications R&D at Samsung Electronics, said in a statement that new approaches to implementing mobile communications in bands above 6 GHz "are crucial to realize the envisaged 5G services with diverse and challenging requirements".
mmMagic aims to develop new concepts for mobile access in the 6 GHz to 100 GHz range, including new waveforms, frame structures and numerology; and new adaptive and cooperative beamforming and tracking techniques, to address the specific challenges of millimeter wave mobile propagation. The group envisages that the resulting access technology would feed into the overall 5G multi-RAT platform, which many expect to integrate a range of new and LTE air interfaces.
The two-year mmMagic initiative is one of 19 research projects co-funded by the 5G-PPP. Other recently announced examples include Fantastic-5G, Norma, and Metis II.
by Caroline Gabriel, Research Director
There are some '5G' discussions and claims which are completely legitimate to have in 2015, especially if next generation networks really are to start appearing from 2020. Vendors, operators and research institutes need to identify the areas in which R&D dollars will be best spent, and it is vital for regulators and policy makers that there are some clear directions on how spectrum will be used in future networks.
There are others which are dramatically premature, particularly all the talk of the '5G air interface' in Barcelona at the recent Mobile World Congress, probably the aspect on which fewest parties are in agreement, and which really does have to wait for the 3GPP to kick off activities.
There are interesting projects in this area - for instance, Alcatel-Lucent and Intel are working on the Universal Filtered OFDM air interface, which had its origins in WiMAX, and could be one candidate for the next generation.
Separate air interfaces may be needed to support IoT nodes in lower frequency bands and high bandwidth applications in the 10-100GHz range. Since the official spectrum policies above 6GHz may not be decided until WRC-19, the industry faces the interesting challenge of "designing new air interfaces ahead of when spectrum is released", as Intel put it.
But there is not even consensus on whether a new air interface is needed at all. "I suspect that it will require a new air interface," said Alex Jinsung Choi, head of SK Telecom's corporate R&D center in South Korea, and Eduardo Esteves, VP of product management for Qualcomm, echoed this as both took part in a panel discussion at Mobile World Congress. But Tom Keathley, SVP of wireless network architecture and design at AT&T, told the same session: "I don't think we know at this stage whether a new air interface will be required. I think it will be a bit of time before we can answer that with certainty."
In general, despite all the marketing hype attached to so-called pre-5G demonstrations, Barcelona attendees were firmly focused on the short to medium term and the achievable. But that did not stop a large number of organizations using the event to launch their 5G manifestos, and seek to place themselves and their particular agendas in the driving seat.
Just ahead of the show, the European Commission fronted a paper which set out an inaugural 5G vision based around its previously announced '5G Public Private Partnership' (5GPPP). It stated the issues (the easy bit) and recited the usual mantras - data volumes of 10 terabytes per square kilometer; one million terminals per square kilometer; one-tenth of the energy consumption and one-fifth of the latency of current platforms; cutting network management to 20% of today's costs; data rates of 50Mbps to every user; location services to within a meter. Then it gave itself the familiar, but perhaps unachievable, deadline of five years to solve all that.
The EC received a lot of attention, but there were plenty of other alliances and proposals. Here is Rethink's selection of the ones which are likely to have a real impact on how '5G' pans out:
The IPv6 Forum has launched a new 5G World Alliance, with the lofty aim of achieving "seamless global network interoperability". President Latif Ladid said: "We are talking here about a 5G world where technologies such as an all-IPv6-based M2M, the mobile IoT, mobile cloud computing, SDN, NFV, fringe and tactile internet will converge over fixed and mobile networks to change lives and businesses everywhere." Ladid said the alliance was currently establishing board members and said it would work alongside the ETSI IPv6 ISG to share its findings.
Among the objectives that the 5GWA is looking to achieve are:
- Global harmonization and synergies of the telecom and internet worlds
- The creation of large-scale worldwide interoperable testbeds
- Promotion of end-user empowering applications and global solutions
- Promotion of interoperable implementation of converging and integrated standards
- Developing educational and '5G-ready' programs
- Resolving issues that could create barriers to 5G deployment
4G Americas has signed a memorandum of understanding with the 5GPPP, outlining the basis for cooperation and collaboration between the two organizations. The MoU specifically agrees to share information on basic system concepts for 5G frequencies to support the global regulatory process, and preparation of future global 5G standards by identification of common interest and consensus building.
The NGMN (Next Generation Mobile Networks) Alliance has published a white paper detailing end-to-end operator requirements for 5G, intended to guide the development of future technology platforms and standards. A global team of more than 100 experts contributed to the white paper by developing the consolidated operator requirements. These are summarized predictably enough - "the capabilities of the network need to be expanded to support much greater throughput, lower latency and higher connection density. To cope with a wide range of use cases and business models, 5G has to provide a high degree of flexibility and scalability by design. In addition, it should show foundational shifts in cost and energy efficiency. On the end user side, a key requirement for 5G will be that a consistent customer experience is achieved across time and service footprint. NGMN envisages a 5G ecosystem that is truly global, free of fragmentation and open for innovations."
Ericsson announced its new '5G for Sweden' research program, involving companies such as Scania and Volvo, as well as several academic and research partners from across the country.
Ericsson said it wanted to develop and roll in ICT solutions into products and services built upon emerging 5G standards. An example of this is work it is doing with Scania, which will examine future transport solutions.
Nokia and Ericsson will collaborate with Korea Telecom on 5G and IoT following the signing of new memorandums of understanding. The first sets up an IoT and LTE-M lab to develop business models aimed at convergence and the automotive industry. This will be on KT premises and will involve all three Nokia business units (Networks, Here and Labs). The second builds on an existing 5G cooperation with Ericsson.
Nokia and NTT Docomo carried out a joint demonstration in Barcelona, of technologies they say will be part of the '5G' networks the pair plan to showcase at the 2020 Olympic Games in Tokyo. They achieved above 2Gbps in the 70GHz band.
China Mobile, NTT Docomo and KT announced that they would conduct a three-way 5G technical collaboration in an attempt to accelerate commercial deployments and drive standardization efforts. They will explore new services and vertical markets enabled by 5G, jointly identify 5G key technologies and prove the validity of system concepts. The operators will also work with global organizations such as ITU, 3GPP, GSMA, NGMN and GTI to facilitate global harmonized spectrum planning and a unified global 5G standard, the companies said in a joint statement.
Subscribe to our Wireless Infrastructure Newsletter
by Caroline Gabriel, Research Director
So Mobile World Congress (MWC) is over for another year, amid the usual record-breaking statistics (from 93,000 visitors, up 45% on the first Barcelona event in 2006; to 7.55Gbps wireless transmission speeds demonstrated by SK Telecom and Samsung).
There were plenty of eye-catching devices, with the Galaxy S6 Edge undoubtedly the star of the show in terms of headline power, though otherwise the mobile gadget space is fragmenting rapidly. The days of a line-up of remarkably similar large-screened smartphones are over - those handsets are there, at ever cheaper price points, but they jostle for attention with virtual reality headsets, connected clothing, smart coffee makers and whisky bottles, and of course the connected cars (Fiat 500 seemed to be the most popular model on display). Indeed, wearables and associated IoT (internet of things) apps virtually colonized MWC's second venue (its previous home in the Fira complex at Plaza Espanya).
Other headlines were sparked by the companies which, back in 2006, when the 3GSM show relocated from Cannes and changed its name, scarcely figured. Google's MVNO plans, Facebook's extension of its internet.org initiative, PayPal's endorsement of NFC with its acquisition of Paydiant - these were the talking points, drowning out the traditional keynote addresses by the major mobile operators.
Traditionally, the CEOs of the established cellcos have used their conference platforms to lay down their demands to the industry (remember then-CEO of Vodafone, Arun Sarin, warning the LTE sector in 2007 to speed up its efforts or face the WiMAX threat; or trading insults with his Nokia counterpart over 3G delays in 2004). These days, it is the new breed of service providers which are setting the pace - Google's Sundar Pichai may have announced a fairly cautious MVNO plan, but his speech had far wider implications, including the call for full WiFi/cellular convergence, still a divisive theme at an event dominated by the entrenched interests of 3GPP platforms.
Those interests are particularly threatened in the IoT, which was a huge theme of the show this year. As the news that Freescale and NXP are to merge neatly demonstrated, this is a dangerous world for the traditional wireless operators and vendors. It throws up significant opportunities to extend their businesses into new, high growth markets, bringing companies like Freescale and NXP - which had been squeezed badly in the smartphone segment - back to Barcelona with new connected device platforms. But the margins on those chips are low and the IoT is already sparking consolidation, as this semiconductor mega-merger illustrates, with the old-school suppliers and operators needing to huddle together for warmth in a business of scale.
Of course, the carrier's network - wireless RAN, core and transport, and increasingly virtualized versions of those - remains the heart of the serious conversations and trading at MWC. With that in mind, we selected our key themes of 2015:
The shape of the new cell site:
After several years when the ever-shrinking base station was the central theme in RAN discussions, this year saw most of the major equipment vendors announcing major refreshes of their macro layers. Massive MIMO (or at least, 8x8 arrays), carrier aggregation across three bands and including TDD, Coordinated Multipoint and Cloud-RAN - these were the important features of the new macro. This was not 5G, but technologies that will be deployable this year or in 2016 - indeed, it seems more than likely that, however '5G' turns out, it will be focused on the dense capacity layer, while the macro coverage umbrella will remain 4G for decades to come.
Small cells were out in force too, and in a widening variety of form factors. Traditional homogeneous mini-base stations are part of a very variegated approach to the capacity layer. They may form clusters with their own controller (local or virtualized) to support an enterprise or a rural deployment. For the former, the big news was that Cisco will resell the Spidercloud Enterprise-RAN solution, despite its own 2013 acquisition of small cell pioneer Ubiquisys. For the latter, the Small Cell Forum kicked off its latest Release Program, devoted to easing deployment issues in rural and remote scenarios, from villages to oil rigs to temporary situations such as disaster relief. Quortus, with its virtualized packet core, was one of the first to update its portfolio to target this important area, while Parallel Wireless was showing off its rural solution, implemented by EE in the UK.
The classic small cell is expanding its reach, seeking to provide greater value than basic coverage and capacity. Ip.access, another of the founders of this industry, has gone as far as to position its Presence Cell purely as the enabler of big data and e-commerce services - and not necessarily connected to the main network at all. Its approach has convinced Vodafone, which announced that it would deploy the retail-oriented platform.
Then there were small cells which did not follow the traditional architecture. Stripped-down antenna/radio units for Centralized-RAN; separate antennas optimized to work with urban small base stations, from companies like Kathrein and CommScope; a converged WiFi/cellular unit from Alcatel-Lucent; hosts of carrier WiFi access points and management platforms as well as lower-power DAS solutions. This is a segment where all options are open, and in which operators will pick and choose the solutions which suit their individual spectrum, business model and capacity requirements.
The virtualization of the RAN is a more distant prospect, for most operators, than the lower risk decision to run a packet core or even a CPE as software on off-the-shelf hardware. However, some pioneers were demonstrating their vRANs, notably Telefonica and China Mobile, and Intel was locked in combat with the ARM ecosystem over the market for high performance processors, optimized for C-RAN servers and accelerators, as the industry chases a general purpose chip with the horsepower to run high end network processes as well as customized silicon.
Not everything can be converted to software of course, though even the physical elements like antennas and radios will be increasingly software-defined and programmable. Pushing that trend to its extreme was Cambridge Consultants, which has developed the IP for the first all-digital radio transmitter, Pizzicato. Unlike conventional software defined radio, it has no analog components, which allows many radios to work together without interference. In the first trial, Cambridge Consultants created 14 simultaneous cellular base station signals at low power, and with the radios "squashed together in a way that analog doesn't tolerate". Such solutions can be programmed to generate manhy combinations of signals at any frequency in an adaptive way. The Pizzicato transmitter consists of an integrated circuit outputting a single stream of bits, and an antenna.
5G:
Of course 5G was a massive talking point, though outside the conference halls and the big vendors' glossy demonstrations, there was less hype than expected about the next generation of wireless, with most operators more focused on technology they could deploy in the next 1-2 years, and eager to wait for key decisions at the World Radio Conference in November, and at the 3GPP and other standards bodies, before getting too excited about 5G. Many alliances were formed and roadmaps laid down, but the most tangible aspect of the discussion was the use of millimeter wave spectrum, in which there were many demonstrations for access and backhaul. The high frequency bands are almost certain to play a key role in next generation wireless, and like many supposed elements of 5G, they will start to have a real impact far earlier, as seen in technologies like 60GHz WiGig and some small cell backhaul solutions, notably InterDigital's Peraso baseband system-on-chip for this market.
LTE-LAA:
There was considerable excitement about LTE-LAA (Licensed Assisted Access), which uses 5GHz spectrum for supplemental downlink to a licensed-band 4G network. Although it will not be standardized until next year, supporters like T-Mobile and Qualcomm showed off their plans, along with a companion technology which aggregates a 5GHz WiFi carrier to LTE. Cellular players were trying to dampen down talk of colonizing licence-exempt spectrum, and stressing that LTE and WiFi could coexist peacefully, both in technical terms and in carriers' business models. However, while LAA is clearly a small cell play, given the high frequencies and low power limits involved, some were arguing that the industry would do better to focus on getting 3.5GHz standardized as a specific small cell band, avoiding WiFi showdowns and the quality challenges of unlicensed spectrum.
Cellular IoT:
As noted above, the IoT was an important theme, but given the nature of the event, there was a particular focus on LTE solutions to support IoT applications, and the question of whether these will prove viable as alternatives to WiFi or specialized long range networks such as Sigfox or LoRa. Huawei was demonstrating its contributions to future LTE-M standards, while the LTE-only baseband specialists, such as Sequans and Altair, have a major opportunity to push 4G-only solutions into a mass market. While the 3GPP works on LTE Category 0 as the underpinning of LTE-M, for now the vendors have resurrected Cat-1, whose low data rates made it a Cinderella specification in the broadband world, but whose ultra-low power consumption now makes it a candidate for the cellular IoT. Sequans, Ericsson and Verizon announced that they had run tests on a commercial LTE network, delivering 10Mbps data rates at very low cost and power, and with peaceful coexistence with higher-powered LTE devices.
The new operators:
Facebook and Google both tried to paint pictures in which they had ongoing close alliances with cellular operators, but they managed to visualize a world in which the MNO's role was severely constrained. They are driving new approaches to the network - full WiFi/cellular convergence; harnessing of LTE-Broadcast for social media as well as content; dynamic spectrum allocation on-demand to hundreds of providers; low cost delivery to the 'next billion' world inhabitants. All of these examples see the web giants becoming less over-the-top and actually shaping the network of the future, with the cellcos just providing part of the plumbing, however important that part. The vision will be supported by virtualization and the ability for cloud platforms to support a new generation of network as a service concepts, spanning WiFi, LTE and other connections, and eventually assigning capacity dynamically to large numbers of MVNOs. That is the end game for platforms like XCellAir, which has been spun out of InterDigital. Such services could be run by traditional operators, as AT&T's Domain 2.0 roadmap clearly envisages, but they could equally be controlled by web or IT majors.
The new operating systems:
It isn't all going Google's way though. Android dominated a show in which Apple plays not part (except in everyone's conversations), but the search giant is struggling to control and unify the user experience as large device and service providers create their own user interfaces and developer platforms. Amazon AppStore broke the 400,000 apps mark, for instance, boasting of "huge progress" with its alternative to Google Play. And as smartphones morph into many new types of connected device, many of them driven from the cloud, there may be the chance for different operating systems to break the Android/iOS duopoly. There was considerable interest in the mobile implementations of Windows 10 from Microsoft, while start-up options like Jolla's Sailfish and Mozilla's Firefox Mobile were looking, for the first time, like credible platforms with operator support, not just bright open source ideas.
by Peter White
The love-in that is the annual Mobile World Congress held in Barcelona has focused squarely on the mass hysteria surrounding the creation of an all-encompassing 5G network which will solve the ills of all cellular participants. How likely is that?
We have already covered the technology directions of a variety of vendors as they prepared for the show - all puling in slightly different directions and yesterday it was the turn of the European Commission, which fronted an inaugural 5G vision in a paper which "explained" 5G and talked about the 5G Public Private Partnership (5GPPP) and how it would solve every radio problem known to man - all within 5 years.
The whiff of hysteria that the industry is in was clearly evident by the breadth and ambition of the paper - but stating the problems is fairly easy - creating the technologies which will provide the solutions - and especially if this happens over the next five years - will be miraculous.
There is the increasing sensation that cellular is pulling together to bail the sinking cellular boat in a similar way to how it responded to the threat of WIMAX when it created LTE over a decade ago. Suddenly all of the rival players are beginning the process of defining what needs to be done, to fend off falling voice revenues, rising data volumes and the dual threats of absorbing WiFi into the fold and acknowledging the possibilities of the Internet of Things.
But how helpful are reciting mantras such as data volumes of 10 terabytes per square kilometer; or 1 million terminals per square kilometer, or reduction to one tenth of the energy consumption or to one fifth of the current latency, or cutting network management to 20% of today's costs, or offering data rates of 50 Mbps to every user, and providing location services to within a meter?
As we say, that is only stating the problem, but Günther Oettinger, European Commissioner for the Digital Economy and Society stood alongside CTOs from Alcatel-Lucent, DoCoMo, Ericsson, Huawei, Intel, Nokia, Orange, Samsung and Thales Alenia Space and told us what he hoped the future might bring.
This amounts to the largest R&D program ever mounted, but this is not to win a war or get a man on the moon. This is to save the momentum of one of the richest industries in the world, which is beset with nothing more prosaic than problems of cost and the hunger of an expectant public.
Here are the list of 5G ingredients if you take the 5GPPP vision; it will be a heterogeneous network (using multiple spectrum and radio technologies); it will in fact support three different kinds of traffic profiles, high throughput for video services, low energy for long-lived IoT sensors and low latency for mission critical enterprise services. Small cells will drift slowly towards Ultra Dense Networks.
And all of this will be on a single network, not some on WiFi, some on cellular and some on specialist IoT networks - no! Because if the cellular community doesn't own ALL of it there won't be enough money to go around. Public safety will be part and parcel of 5G too.
It will integrate networking, computing and storage into one programmable and unified infrastructure and leverage from the characteristic of current cloud computing, and create the opportunity for virtual pan European operators. There will be variants for vertical markets such as automotive, energy, food and agriculture, city management, government, healthcare, manufacturing and public transportation.
5G will support many more devices simultaneously and improve terminal battery life and help European citizens manage their personal data, tune their exposure over the Internet and protect their privacy.
The new air interface will use enhanced spectral efficiency, which we presume will come from someone getting past the Shannon limit.
Somehow in there the 5GPPP threw in the idea that satellites would be involved, but perhaps this is just a sop thrown to Alcatel and Thales, given that European mobile satellite services were still-born and will do nothing for latency.
The new 5G will use simultaneous radio technologies to increase reliability and availability and it will rely on better interference mitigation, backhauling and installation techniques.
We could go on, but the paper is quite clearly all things to all people, it places cellular at the heart of all IT services, and absorbs fiber as if cellular operators all owned all the fiber in the world. Well if they keep buying fixed line operators they soon will. It naturally has a high dosage of Software Defined Networking, Network Functions Virtualization, Mobile Edge Computing and Fog Computing (Cloud to the edge), and uses Data Analytics and Big Data to monitor QoS through new metrics.
For the past five years we have talked to people chasing that simple problem of how to be sure that cellular customers are getting the experience that we imagine we are sending to them OTT - simple QoS and no-one has been able to agree on a simple process for it. Solving that alone in five years would be an accomplishment, never mind the rest.
One interesting hard fact pushed was the involvement of 6 GHz into the mix. Certainly this high volume, low penetrating spectrum, which could make lots of bandwidth for heavy data lifting is a distinct possibility, in the same way that WiFi has flirted with 60 GHz for same room communication in what is a layered approach - so cellular could talk long distance in 700 MHz, shorter distance in 3G and 4G spectrum, and shorter distances in high volume in both 5 GHz and 6 GHz, in a multi-layered network. There is at least a basis in that statement for 5G planning and lobbying for spectrum clearance.
The start of commercial deployment of 5G systems is expected by 2020 it says, though we think this is unlikely, but the exploratory phase to understand detailed requirements is already under way said the 5GPPP.
Not one word was said throughout this indulgent fantasy, about data and services costs, and until the cellular community at large comes up with a pricing formula which consumers are willing to continue paying beyond 2020, they will find that whatever they bring to market may stumble on what is in consumer pockets.
Meanwhile just to give even greater clout to the Chinese voice over what 5G may look like, Indian operator Bharti Airtel this week signed a partnership deal with China Mobile. Initially they will work towards growth of the LTE ecosystem and go in for joint procurement of devices such as Mifi, smart phones, data cards, LTE CPEs and USIM. Later they will collaborate on promoting their own robust ecosystem to accelerate the commercialization of TD-LTE across 4.5G and 5G technologies.
