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LTE was designed mainly for the delivery of mobile broadband over smartphones. However, a progressive flattening of broadband revenues has led network operators to seek out new markets and new use cases, in which connectivity can provide economic benefits. These use cases often have different use cases from those of mobile broadband. Some of them, for example mMTC (Massive Machine Type Communications), can be addressed by enhancing the LTE specifications. However, other use cases cannot be supported so easily over LTE, and require a new technology to address them properly. The technology is known as the 5G New Radio (NR)....

2018 will be the start of the journey for those defining their 5G strategy. Specifications will be frozen by 3GPP in Sept 2018, with commercial deployments expected from around 2020. Senior managers, key thinkers and strategists are considering the ways in which the potential of 5G communications can be maximised in such contexts as connected and autonomous vehicles, massive machine-type communications, critical communications, smart cities, virtual and augmented reality, Industry 4.0 and so on. Many network operators have already conducted trials of 5G, as well as announcing plans to demonstrate the technology and to rollout commercial deployments. In South Korea,...

The Wray Castle Strategy and Technology – Positioning for 5G training course rapidly builds a range of competencies critical to maximising the opportunities being presented by both digital transformation and the adoption of 5G and advanced technology concepts. The 5G initiative provides the focus for the next digital revolution that encompasses connected innovation and the increasing digitalisation of a wide range of industries, as well as advanced connectivity and communications. It provides the foundation for transforming business models and positioning; the customer proposition and focus; and the technologies that underpin that transformation. However, aligning strategic technology choices to take full advantage of...

In the first part of this blog, we discussed the requirements for 5G and the specification process being undertaken by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) and the Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP). Here, we continue the discussion by investigating the potential technical solutions. Mobile telecommunication systems have traditionally operated in the UHF band, from 300 MHz to 3 GHz. This has given the best trade-off between the competing issues of coverage and capacity, which are greater at low and high frequencies respectively. Unfortunately the UHF band is now extremely fragmented and congested, so attention is being directed to the SHF...

It is now seven years since LTE was standardized and six years since the launch of the first LTE networks. With new generations of mobile communication technology appearing every ten years or so, and network operators struggling to meet their users’ demands for bandwidth, research for 5G is already well under way. The demands on 5G networks will be severe: network traffic is forecast to increase by a factor 1,000 over the next 10-12 years, while the growth of the Internet of Things suggests that the number of connected devices may reach 50 billion by 2020. At the same time,...