IEEE Future Directions
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Following on the previous posts looking at the “5 reasons why 5g is the Future“:
5. Communication and Collaboration
The article claims that the increased speed offered by 5G will (better) support collaborative work, teleworking and will increase business effectiveness easing the access to big data and big data analytics.
There is no doubt that the increased amount of spectrum will support more capacity. Interestingly, it is not a characteristic of 5G to deliver more capacity (its hertz bit efficiency is basically the same as 4G, since we have reached the Shannon limit), it is the progress in electronics, processing capacity in particular, that makes possible to have more sophisticated MIMO in the cellphones (and in the network antenna of course) and to manage higher frequencies (that in turn means higher spectrum availability). The downside of higher frequencies, of course, is that propagation becomes more problematic and to be safe you need to have smaller cells (which is good from the point of view of capacity since you serve a smaller area but is bad from the cost point of view since you need more antennas and fibre connection to the base station).
All foresights point to a continuous increase in data traffic as I mentioned in yesterday post. Most of this increase is tied to the growing consumption of video streaming and video in general and this is related to the mass market much more than to the business market.
There are, of course, a few businesses where video is important but by far most business are pretty fine with 4G (that, by the way, is more than capable to deliver high quality video). Collaboration in some instances will require very high bandwidth (like working on virtual 3D projection of components) but in most cases this will take place in fixed location where fixed network (with wireless drop for the last meters) so there is really no absolute need for 5G in collaboration activities.
Well, having considered all the “reasons” brought forward to support 5G I guess you got my point (of course you may not agree with it, although so far I did not have received any comment opposing what I said): 5G is not going to be essential to deliver new services that will create premium returns to the Operators.
This does not mean that 5G will not be used. It will, and we will all benefit from the additional bandwidth delivered, although it is unlikely that we will actually notice it. The fact is that Operators will upgrade their network in synch with the increasing demand to avoid investing without generating returns. With most bandwidth hungry applications 4G is good enough if you have access to the cell capacity. The problem starts when many others are accessing that same capacity. A similar thing will happen with 5G.
Where 5G really shines, and I was surprised not to have this mentioned in the “reasons” is the new network architecture and the massive softwarization of resources making the all network much more flexible. Network resources, in principle, could be reserved by the edges, by the applications, the applications can negotiate the best access gateway and the end to end connectivity. Software Defined Networks and Network Function Virtualisation (expected to take hold early in the next decade) will make a difference. They could also change the rules of the game shifting the control to the applications and/or service providers.
