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The CW 5G Debate ‘Debate 1: Technology Readiness’ 24th October 2016

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The CW 5G Debate in association with the NIC ‘Debate 1: Technology Readiness’ 24th October 2016 The Shard, London

Participants

WW: William Webb, CW (Chair)

JS: Jeremy Smith [Mathys & Squire]- speaker

PG: Phil Graham, CEO National Infrastructure Commission – speaker

JB: Joe Butler, Ofcom – panellist

MR: Moray Rumney, Keysight Technologies – panellist

HB: Howard Benn, Samsung – panellist

PC: Paul Ceely, BT – panellist

SR: Stuart Revell, 5GIC – audience

SP: Simon Pike – audience

DB: Dean Bubley – audience


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WW: Tonight, we’re delighted to have a wide range of sponsors for which we’re very grateful. So, thank you to the National Infrastructure Commission who will be saying a few more words shortly. To Cambridge Consultants, to Huawei and to Ofcom and to our hosts, Mathys & Squire. I will now hand over to Jeremy who is going to say a few words about what you are up to.

JS: So, thank you very much for the introduction. It’s a real pleasure to welcome you all and so many of you here today to our head office in the Shard. For what promises to be a very, very interesting and informative event. The partners and the staff at Mathys & Squire would like to thank you, obviously, all for coming and especially to Cambridge Wireless for organising such a good event.

So, to give you a little bit of background about Mathys & Squire, for those of you that don’t know us. We’re a firm of intellectual property attorneys. We provide a full range of services in the intellectual property area for things like patents, trademarks, designs, copyright etc. We do contentious work such as litigation before the courts, oppositions before the European Patent Office and non-contentious things such as writing patent applications, filing them at patent offices and progressing them through the patent system.

Since the founding of Mathys & Squire over a century ago, we have had telecommunication is, really, the bedrock of what we do. And the founder of Mathys & Squire, Albert William Mathys, actually has an early telecoms related patent. So, that’s an image of it there and this is relating to electric signalling systems and it was for one of the early electronic telegraphic printers. And whilst telecommunications technology clearly moves on and has moved on a great deal over the past century or so, it’s good to see that the goals that Mathys had in greater reliability and greater speed are probably goals that will be very familiar to 5G engineers today.

Recently we have been seeing some of the early conceptual 5G patent applications coming through. It remains to be seen whether that will actually be what gets adopted. So, we’re watching these developments that occur at the standard with great interest to try and keep our clients’ patent applications relevant to the standard and standard’s essential.

So, thank you all and I really, hope that you enjoy the debate.

[applause]

WW: So, I’d like to ask, Phil Graham, CEO of NIC to say a few words about why you’re sponsoring this event.

PG: Thank you very much. And thank you, all of you for coming along to participate in today’s discussion. The National Infrastructure Commission has just turned one year old. Which is quite exciting for us and we’ve also just gone through another milestone in our development in that the government just earlier this month announced it plans to establish us as a permanent body. We will be an executive agency of the Treasury from


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January of next year. And in the process of doing so the government is beginning the process of appointing a permanent chair. Lord Adonis is our interim chair, at the moment, but the idea was that we would always launch an open competition to take that forward and that’s just about to begin.

So, the development of the National Infrastructure Commission and its establishment as a permanent of the statutory framework for making long term infrastructure decisions is moving forward. And that reflects our mission, which is to change and improve the way in which we plan and deliver the infrastructure in this country through expertise analysis, long term planning and strategic advice.

The establishment of the Infrastructure Commission recognises the fact that infrastructure decisions in the UK have, for too long, been caught up in political cycles, have been looked at too much in isolation on a sector by sector basis and have been too short term and taken too long to happen.

So, the National Infrastructure Commission is an attempt to break through that by setting up an independent body whose members are outside the political cycle, outside of the political process backed up by a team who can provide really, effective, independent advice bringing government and industry together to help move those decisions forward. And that’s what we’re here to do.

Our workload takes broadly two forms. The first part of it is that once every Parliament are asked to produce an overarching national infrastructure assessment. We’ve recently consulted on the process and methodology for the first one of those and will be announcing the response to consultation soon, as well as opening-up a call for evidence. And when that comes out I’d really, encourage, you to look at it. That’s going to look broadly across all areas of the economic infrastructure, transport, water, energy, floods, waste, but crucially, also, communications and digital communications which in many respects are becoming more and more the glue that holds all of that together. And that will look 10 to 30 years’ ahead and will then, attempt to identify the UK’s long term priorities and the steps that will be taken in order, to make sure those priorities are met. But alongside that long term assessment process we’re also asked to undertake a series of shorter projects, looking in more depth at the particular infrastructure challenges that the UK faces.

We’ve published the first three reports related to those studies in the budget. Looking at transport in London and in the North and looking at how we can inject greater flexibility in to our energy system. We’re now working on the second round of studies, one of which, is looking at the infrastructure needs of the Oxford, Milton Keynes and Cambridge corridor. But the second of which, is looking at how the UK can position itself to be a world leader in the deployment of 5G technology. And we’ve been asked to complete the work by the end of this calendar year. So, we’re starting to get to the point where emerging views are beginning to come together. We’d actually be delighted to have you all in the room today. Because as our thinking has developed we really, want to test that with a broad range of people from across the industry, and at least some of the other organisations who have, to deal with these issues on a day to day basis.

So, for us this is an important event. It’s one of two. We’ve got another one on 8th November, looking more at the industry structures and the financing issues. But this one is looking more at technology.


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So, let me say a few words to frame the discussion and give you an outline of our thinking.

I think it’s a truism, and certainly for anyone in this room not something that they don’t know. But mobile is obviously ever more important and that is why the government is asking us to look at these issues as part of our role as an advisor on national and strategic infrastructure projects. It’s critical to our daily lives, whether making calls, sending messages or more and more using database services, in order, to live our lives in the way that we would like to. But it also underpins our digital economy. And that’s set to continue in much more far reaching ways as we move ahead. As more and more of the appliances we use, of the ways in which businesses function, are going to be by digital connectivity - how can we deliver the underpinning connectivity that makes that happen?

5G is one of the developing technologies that we think might enable us to deliver on those needs and promise to enable that future vision with greater capacity, greater speeds and more flexible network connectivity. It may mean communication not just person to person but again, I’m not telling you what you don’t know, but also person to machine and machine to machine.

So, relatively recently as we see it, and at an extremely rapid pace compared to infrastructure sectors, mobile connectivity, I think, has moved from being a luxury item. And only a few decades ago we thought of mobile connectivity as being something that just a few bankers in the city needed as they carried around mobiles the size of bricks, to something that’s absolutely, crucial to all, of, our everyday lives and to how all, of, our economy operates. So, it’s crucial to industry, it’s crucial to government and that puts us now, as we, sort of, go through that switch from nice to have to must have, at quite an interesting juncture.

In the mobile ecosystem to date, through from its innovation based origins, through to its current competitive market, over pinned by regulatory structure, has done a good job of getting us to where we are today. It gives us broadly speaking the services we want, broadly, when and where we want them certainly at a price that is competitive. But as it transitions towards something that’s closer to a utility, something that’s more under pinning of every aspect of our economy and is important in many ways as road and rail, as water and electricity to our ability to participate as citizens and to run our lives - we need to ask and this is what we are beginning to ask. Whether the existing model will deliver what we need going forward. As what we need becomes much more demanding and ambitious when we need as this pervades more and more of our lives. And where we need it as we become dependent on it in more and more aspects of our daily business.

And particularly, as we approach something with 5G on the horizon that, and I think this is one of the questions that we really, wanted to ask today, that looks like it might be less of an incremental change and more of, a sort of, transformational shift in technology.

We’re really, interested in whether there are ways in which the government can usefully play a greater role. Removing barriers that there might be, as we’re seeing at, the moment, with the reforms to the electronic communications code and to some of the planning regulations around mobile connections. Perhaps, putting in place some of the underpinning infrastructure that the market on its own isn’t going to deliver either due to lack of an investment pace or due to barriers to access or other factors.


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This isn’t about replacing the market or removing the market. But it’s about whether there are ways in which government can remove the friction that is preventing the marketing from doing its business in the most efficient way possible. And meeting both our needs now, but particularly putting us, in a, position to, move quickly to meet the needs of the economy as we move forward.

So, with that in mind, we’re sponsoring these two sessions with the support of CW (Cambridge Wireless) to whom we’re extremely grateful for putting together, at what the CEO has just reminded me was extremely short notice. Apologies for that, you have done a fantastic job.

The first of these as I said, is focused more on the technology. It’s about 5G as the underpinning core technology. 5G being one view of the future, but given there’s an opportunity to explore whether there are others, and gives us an opportunity to tease out some of the relevant issues whether that’s the government (central or local), for regulators, for operators, for users, and for other market participants. And then thinking, as we think about these technological options, what are the services to have in mind. To what extent should we be focused on 5G or to what extent should we be looking more, broadly, at all the technologies that are available to us. And what are the steps that we can be taking to enable the opportunities to be unlocked and to be taken forward rapidly.

Sessions like this, are absolutely, crucial to us. It’s really, important to the National Infrastructure Commission that we’re not simply a bit of government that happens to sit in a different room or, a different building, but rather that we have a different approach to coming up with that recommendation. That we engage broadly. That we speak to industry. That we’re prepared to have an open conversation. We’re now thinking of these emerging issues. We’re not waiting till we’ve taken the decision before we come and explain why we’ve done it.

So, a really, open debate is something that’s incredibly valuable to us. I hope you’ll be able to participate in that spirit. We’re very excited to have such an august group of people in the room with this. I’m really, looking forward to the discussion. Having said that, I will apologise now for the fact that I’m going to have to leave early. But Joe Butler, who is part of the panel, and who is part of our team – and originally from Ofcom – is participating. Henry Shennon and James Paden who’s been leading this project and Peter Starkings who is our head of communications are here throughout the session. I wish you a really, really, exciting debate. I can’t wait to hear what you have, to say. Thank you.

[applause]

WW: Thank you Phil.

So, by way of background and to tease out what Phil said today’s debate is more about the technology questions.

Just today, I saw a news item that was looking at some survey of 800 people from across the industry and it asked them when they thought 5G was to be deployed and the majority, of them said sometime between around 2018 and 2019. Wow!

I was at a congress about three weeks ago. And there was a panel there of some very august CTOs of major operators and manufacturers. And they were asked by the


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chairman, what is 5G? And the most coherent thing they managed to say was, it’s whatever the user wants it to be.

So, to put whatever the user wants into this timeframe means something’s got to give and the idea of this debate is to try and tease out what it is that’s going to give.

Now I’m going to let the panellists have a few open words. Before I do that, a little bit of audience participation. So, every now and again, I might throw out a question and ask for a show of hands just to see how the overall feel in the room is. And when I do it, I’m generally going give you two opposing points of view and of course you’re all going to say, well, actually, I’m somewhere in the middle. But I’d ask you to either pick one or the other just for the spirit of this kind of the event, and we’ll see how views, sort of, shape up throughout the evening.

So, the tenor of the question for tonight, in a way is, is there anything new for 5G to do? Or, actually, is, everything going to be done in the evolution of 4G and Wi-Fi and LP-WAN IoT and therefore there won’t be a need for a new 5G at all? It will just evolve from these various things. So, let’s see what the opinion on that one is to start off.

So, I’m going to ask you to put up your hands either to say, you think it’s just an evolution of the existing stuff. Or, do some of you think there’s something new and important coming out in 5G.

So, who thinks it’s just an evolution of all the existing stuff at this, point in time?

Audience: Slightly more than half raise their hand

That looks like a bit more than half, okay. And just to make sure you know everyone’s participating who thinks it’s something new?

Audience: Slightly less than half raise their hand

Yes. That’s probably slightly less than half, but it’s a reasonably even split across the room there. So, that’s interesting.

WW: I’m going to let the panellists do the talking with some hopefully, reasonably incisive questioning. I’m not going to open it up in general to the floor during the discussion. But if you’ve got a point that you want to make that’s on message for what we’re talking about and feel particularly strongly about it, wave your hand around quite violently until I see you and I’ll try and bring you in at some suitable point in time. And we’ll see how we get on. So, I’ve asked all the panellists if they want to just have a couple of minutes of open remarks. And we’ll start with Joe the far end.

JB: Okay. Hello everyone. I’m Joe Butler. I’m from the National Infrastructure Commission, on loan from Ofcom. I will just make some very short remarks, because I think between William and Phil, they have covered a reasonable amount of what I was going to say. I’m very interested to hear everyone’s views today about where 5G is going to play a role, where it might not play a role. You know, what the technology evolution is going to be and I think it’s very interesting that we started off with a 50/50 split. I think that this says quite a lot straightaway.


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But I wanted to pick on Phil’s comments about mobile becoming more and more essential to our daily lives. I think, the fact there is a substantial proportion of the population that think it’s completely essential to their daily live already, makes me really, think if you roll forwards in another 10 years, that’s going to be really, completely the case. And the importance of mobile is still growing and underpinning more and more- particularly the forecasted underpinning of machine to machine communications etc, is going to make that situation increasingly the case.

So, I think it’s interesting it’s not regulated like a utility. It’s been very successful by not being regulated like a utility. So, that puts us in an interesting place. So, we do not have a situation where we can guarantee service to everyone of a certain standard. This opens-up an interesting debate, what actually should those standards be? And I wonder if we can do a lot better, in terms of what does good look like here. Much as I’m interested in grand visions of what 5G can do and what it can be, I think there is something about articulating what it’s likely to do and what it’s likely to be. And I think it’s quite important for us to think about what is going to be delivered by the private sector and where we are going to really struggle. And then in that case, Phil characterised it as, ‘what do we want and where do we want it and when do we want it’.

So, if we want to be forward looking in this country about under pinning the digital economy, etc. etc. where do we want to be on that. Will the private sector deliver what we need in a timely way? I’m not going to give any answers on that but let me give a quite sort of simplistic example I think of something that’s quite personal to me and not particularly part of my professional life. If I get on the train from Brighton to London which I do on a very, very regular basis, I would dearly love to be able to make a phone call!

[laughter]

JB: … that lasted longer than 30 seconds. I would also like to be able to browse the internet in a, sort of, fairly, continual way and access cloud services. So, it’s pretty, clear to me that the market hasn’t delivered yet on road and rail what we might expect. And, that’s not a question of technology. That’s, you know, in working for Ofcom, we released 4G spectrum to the market in 2013. EE were enabled to deploy 4G with their spectrum in 2012. It’s not a technology question. But I can’t do those things at this point. So, for me, that’s very much an infrastructure question. How do you get the right infrastructure in the right places, whether it’s private, whether it’s publicly funded, how do we, actually, make that sort of meshed picture deliver what we all view now as something that’s a utility rather than purely a luxury? And I think just going one step further, I think it’s quite interesting to try and think about what we define as the utility element. What’s the utility versus what is … what’s more luxury, I’ll term it?

So, I would certainly put, currently, voice, texting, accessing the internet at a reasonable speed, being able to use Google Maps all utility elements. But if you roll forwards another 10 years, it’s quite unclear what that view will be. But I think it’s quite important that we do start to articulate that. Because it’s very unhelpful to say, everyone will have 5G. We’ll have it across the UK. Everyone will get it. Personally, I don’t think the country can afford to roll out 200 metre spaced, millimetre wave 5G cells that would be low latency and instant mobile connected. I don’t think we probably need it either. But I do think what we need to do is think about what we do need in different areas of the country and when we need that by.


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So, I’m hoping this debate is going to surface some of these issues.

WW: So, thank you Joe. And before we move, you’ve raised an interesting question. So, let’s do another snap audience poll and pick up on one of those points.

So, if you had to choose between 5G delivering, let’s say, consistent communications absolutely, everywhere, including on trains and all those other places, but no faster than generally, let’s say, 10 megabits a second. Or, it delivering blindingly fast, 100 megabits even gigabits a second in pockets of places and also some super low latency services. But that coverage would be no better on trains than they are now for example. Which way would you head?

So, hands up for consistent connectivity or hands up for high speed mobility.

So, consistent connectivity.

Audience: vast majority of audience raises hand

WW: That is, you all want to make that phone call right. Is there anyone would have gone for the super high speed stuff?

Audience: 2 or 3 audience members raises hand

WW: Okay, so two or three but a very strong weighting towards the consistency of connectivity. Which is interesting, and actually very much, in line with a number of various surveys that I’ve seen for the wider population, that that’s the direction they want to go now.

Interesting. Moray, your turn.

MR: Thanks, William. So, I’ve got some good news. 5G is going to be much easier than Brexit.

[laughing]

MR: The reason is, we’ve got experts that actually understand the technology, unlike in the world of politics and economics where people just kind of make stuff up.

[laughing]

MR: That said, there’s a lot of noise around 5G. And when it comes to making big decisions like the NIC is going to have to make, you better decide where you’re going to get your knowledge and your opinion from. Is it going to come from marketing slideware and simulations or is it going to come from the observation of reality backed up by Maxwell’s Equation. I tend to favour the latter.

I work in standards in the 3GPP committee that’s developing the new radio. And I don’t yet think there’s an intuitive feel in the industry about what’s actually possible yet with some of this new technology. And that’s why early trials of this technology are so important. And there are a number of those going on right now, or will be towards the end of this year in the US, Korea, Japan etc.


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One of the things I think is really important is to focus on the technical investments that are going to return the greatest economic value to the country. And it’s interesting in your question William, you mentioned I think the technical part of your question which was, do you prefer 10 megabits everywhere or high speed. You threw the word 5G in there and tagged it to both.

WW: Yes.

MR: So, maybe … we should focus on the outcome, not on the name of the technology that actually, you might call it.

WW: Yes Yes. Good point.

MR: So, in answer to the question of this debate, is 5G technically ready yet? Well not yet. But we are working on it. And as technologists it’s absolutely the case that we can make this stuff work. The question for me, the big question is, at what cost and what are the alternatives. So, I’ll leave it there.

WW: And we’ll certainly pick up on some of those points as we drill down in the further questions. Thank you. Howard?

HB: Thank you. So, I seem to have seen quite a few of you before at other events talking about 5G and I think a lot of you will have seen my technical presentation.

Samsung Electronics is a very large company. We turn over around about 200 billion dollars a year. So, that just goes to show that telecoms, is a very good and very big business. What’s interesting about where I sit is straddling the research and standards community but also the business community. So, we have to sell product and we have to make a profit. And, that in the end I think, will determine what 5G ends up being.

You have a look at the way the standards are evolving, at the moment, in 3GPP. I think for some people the progress has been fast but also has not been revolutionary. It’s been a relatively small step change, so far, on what we have. I think we can talk later about whether we think that’s going to change in the future. But that’s because the product that we make, we have to sell, so, on that question you had earlier about coverage and capacity, maybe another snap question.

WW: Yes.

HB: Would you pay twice as much for your mobile phone, for your monthly subscription if the coverage was improved.

And in the UK, we have an extremely competitive marketplace. So, I’ve just recently been upgrading my eldest daughter’s contract. And the choice you get for £10 a month is phenomenal. You get almost unlimited calls, unlimited texts and 500 megabytes of data a month. So, what would you be willing to pay? That is a really, interesting question moving forward. So, hopefully we can address some of those points in the debate this evening.

WW: So, let’s ask, a variant of that question. We won’t draw too much into that because that’s really the subject for the next 5G debate on the 8th November – but I’m interested in your take on it.


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So, mobile revenues have generally been in very gentle decline for about the last five years. I think most operators have seen ARPUs drop by roughly 2% a year for the last five years. And certainly, with 4G of course there was a brief spell of trying to charge more for it. And then everyone gave up on that and it was offered for the same price as everything else.

So, who thinks that, actually, 5G will see a turnaround in that trend and will actually see ARPUs increase – or who thinks that actually we’ll continue along the same kind of lines or very slight changes in ARPU even with 5G introduction. So, who’s for increase in ARPUs with 5G?

MS3: On the consumer side?

WW: Yes, on the consumer side.

WW: Okay, so, at the moment, the general view is that the people assume that there’s not going to be a 5G revenue hike. But who knows. Paul?

PC: So, over to me. So, my name is Paul Ceely. I’m head of mobile and strategy for BT. And, a lot of what I’ve written down on my carefully handwritten note has already been said. But I’ll repeat some of it.

So, I’m an optimist and I think technology can make the world a better place. And, you can see, a lot of the themes that are coming through, the reason why people are really, getting behind 5G is because of this idea of digitisation and the fact that it’s changing the world and making things better. And, also, there’s a feeling that there’s a need for developing, creating jobs, giving a platform for innovation and so on. And to do that you need ubiquitous and reliable wireless networks under-pinning everything.

Obviously, today, 4G is really, good. And Wi-Fi also. We’re really, pleased, so we were involved from the EE side which is now part of BT. We launched 4G and the network performs really, well. And it’s got a great roadmap looking forward in terms of increasing the capability of it, the performance of it and so on. So, 4G plus or LTE advanced and so on.

So, all of that’s happening. But 5G hasn’t been completed yet. And I’m also, optimistic that we can make another step change in performance. And there is a demand, you can see this from everyone. You talk about reliance on mobile and that with all of our customers. You see that with the rail. You know 10 years ago that wouldn’t have been such a big issue. Now it’s a big issue. And obviously, the rail industry moves very, very slowly. So, it’s quite hard to work with them from a mobile creating …

[laughing]

WW: The trains. The trains or the industry?

[laughing]


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PC: So … well, and both. You could probably comment on the fact that there’s only one high speed line in the UK to give you that kind of indication. It moves very, very slowly1, so it’s very hard to keep to pace to what people want to do. But that’s the demand that we see.

In terms of you were saying, is there anything new with 5G? I think there is. And I think there has to be as well. If you think about it, 4G was launched in Europe, more, or less, around 2009/2010, as a mainstream technology. The majority of mainstream leading technology in terms of the device or the uses, were probably launched mid 2010s. And so logically, 5G might be adopted around 2025 for mainstream use. And then if you imagine 6G, if we have one, this will be in 2035. My point being, that will 4G be good enough? 4G and Wi-Fi today, incremental improvements, will that be good enough in 2035? I don’t think so.

So, I think we do need to have transformational technology. And I think we’re smart enough collectively to do that, and we have the capability.

And another thing, 4G is here. If you want ubiquitous connectivity, which is what everyone wants, then we will need to use 4G as a base layer. It will take too long to replace it with something else. So, it will be a part of the solution. So, 5G will be a system using all, of these other types of technology. It’s not just going to be a new radio. It will use 4G. It will use Wi-Fi because there are places Wi-Fi gets that is particularly difficult to get to, particularly inside buildings. And so 5G will be assisting using all, of these other kinds of technologies.

And that brings a whole bunch of other things that are clearly needed and which you mentioned. I was going to mention … - I wanted to be the first one to mention - dumb smart things, as in the recent IoT DoS Camera attacks. And you can see it clearly there’s things that don’t work today that need to be solved, particularly around security, privacy. This idea of reliable connectivity, particularly in specific messages, is very important.

So, now when I go running with this smartphone, I’ve got a strap so it doesn’t fall off my wrist. And I use a running app, which has a function called a beacon which is a kind of a personal safety thing. Personal safety is really, important. So, that one piece of messaging is really, important. But the other background stuff that it (the smartphone) does - just news items that get to my phone are not so important at all, but it is all happening all at the same time. At, the moment, what we have to do is overbuild the network in order that the particular piece of communication gets through reliably. Clearly, as I think Joe was saying earlier the costs sometimes don’t make sense. So, to get the fine-grained services to work the way that we want them that’s where network slicing comes in, a different way to build it now that it requires analytics.

It requires solving issues with privacy and security because you need to understand what each individual device is doing. All of things are not well served with the current technologies.

So, that’s why I think there is much to do and there is much capability to do it.

1 The development of new rail infrastructure. In comparison to the rate of change of mobile technology, to be

clear.


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WW: Okay. Thank you. So, thank you for everyone for their opening remarks.

So, what I’m going to do now is try and at first pick up particular elements of what people have been saying 5G might be in terms of the sort of subsystems it might encompass. And then having done that, we’ll then come back to the point that, in, particular Paul was making, that, actually this is more than a subsystem, this is a totality of systems.

But I think, until we get an understanding of what these different lower levels might look like, it’s difficult to come back to the overall higher level question.

So, what I’m going to do now, is ask for the panelists’ views in three areas. So, I think whilst there’s been many different claims about what 5G might be, most people have now said roughly it falls in to three spaces.

One is better mobile broadband - faster and more ubiquitous. Another one is internet of things and the third is an ultra -reliable, ultra-low latency, tactile internet kind of system - which has become somewhat synonymous with millimetre waves but not necessarily. We’ll come back to that.

So, let’s drill in to each of those a bit first. So, this a technical session and we can ask the technical questions. And then, once we’ve done that, let’s then step back a little from the answers we get, and see where we’re going.

So, the first one then, the more ubiquitous, slightly better, broadband if you like. By, and large, most people sort of lump that into, it’s all happening below 6 GHz because that’s a sort of natural cut-off, of the spectrum in terms of what the regulators are looking at for 5G. So, sub 6 GHzGHz and this sort of concept of a new radio which would be great. But I’m not sure what the new radio is yet. So, can anyone throw any light on that for me to start off with?

MR: Well, I guess I could start. I was interested that you described the new radio in terms of sub 6 GHz because the new radio that 3GPP is developing is very much at millimetre wave. So, I guess that, yes, the vision of 3GPP of the enhanced mobile broadband is very much distinct from LTE Advanced Pro. So there is a split there.

I think there are things going on below 6 GHz which are not new radio which are more in the evolution space. Then it’s the enhanced mobile broadband that is expecting to be going up to millimetre wave. In terms of what it will look like, well they’re still working on that. There are some early pre-trial pre-standard systems which have been developed by Verizon and some other companies like KT. And those are looking like they’re going to be at 28 GHz, with about 800 MHz bandwidths with data rates 10to 100 times higher than what we’re used to. So, that’s kind of what they’re targeting at a very high level in terms of new radio.

WW: So, do you think simplistically below 6 GHz, essentially it’s a continuous evolution of 4G or MIMO, slightly more challenging applications, that kind of stuff all just continuing to build along the current path?

MR: At the radio level, that seems to be what’s happening and how much value there is in that, I’m not sure. There are things that could be done with, for instance in the 3.5 GHz spectrum, or maybe in the 4 GHz spectrum there’s some areas where you could maybe get


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some more bandwidth. In which case, you could start thinking about changing some of the numerology or the wave forms. But I don’t think that’s necessarily a huge focus for 5G. I think that would be an incremental sort of thing that’s not going to make a huge difference.

WW: Okay. Howard, do you want to add anything to that?

HB: Yes, so, well first of all, ETSI have just decided what the name for advanced mobile broadband is going to be at the PCG meeting on Friday. And it’s going to be 5G.

[laughing]

HB: The meeting started with a room full of people saying, it can be anything but 5G. It had some very strange names put forward. So, I think one of the questions for me, is what actually is 5G. And 5G is this name that we put on something that isn’t tangible. I don’t think there will be anything that you can tangibly say, is 5G. It’s like saying 4G LTE, what actually is LTE? Well, LTE is lots of things. There are thousands of features in 3GPP that add together in different releases - combine multiple releases together and then you get this LTE that phones and networks can implement different features. It’s all still all called LTE.

So, we have a tendency, to say, 5G is going to be something revolutionary and different or we can say, 5G is going to be a bit evolutionary. Why can’t it be both? And in, essence, I think in the standards world, what you’ll see is a continual evolution of LTE. You know I think we all realise that. There are going be new radio technologies to sort out new problems that we have. And I think this 5G framework should provide us with more flexibility. So, I think that’s where the key differences are going to be. Not, necessarily so much in the RAN area, although there’s been lots of proposals for different ways of doing things.

So, we use this cyclic prefix OFDM at the moment. It’s a good technology for broadband access. That’s what it was designed to do in the first place. Not so good if you want kind of really, narrow band IoT type services. So, can we design new radio technology, new wave form that is better at doing this. A lot of the research communities have put forward a lot of ideas that are getting discussed at the moment. They’re not going to make it into the first release of 5G and 3GPP. It’s fairly inevitable now given the work that’s gone on.

And some of that is driven again by the market.

So, where is the money? The money at the moment is with a couple of US operators who want to roll out broadband and access, fixed access to homes to compete with fibre because it’s very expensive to get bits of fibre from the hub in to the home. And they don’t have the same wired infrastructure that perhaps the BTs of this world can utilise, G.fast can do that final mile. And so, there is a technology there that you can then build on.

It will handle mobile devices. Perhaps not on day one, but it’s designed to handle mobility. And you will get Gigabit per second access. And one of the questions I think here is, is it all about high speed, is it all about gigabits per second? Partially, yes, because that’s what sells. You know that’s what sells phones. Capacity on networks is going up. More people want to watch more video on their phone. We’ve got augmented reality coming along,


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virtual reality which is starting to get really, popular in the gaming world. And there’s going to be a choice. There’s going to be a whole range of services there.

So, the technology, I think, is slowly moving on that broadband route. IoT, is a totally different matter. I think, IoT is far more challenging. So, we’ll talk about that later.

WW: So, what I’m hearing is, and keeping things relatively simple, that, for the 6 GHz and below, actually, what we’re going to see, is a continual evolution of 4G. We know what that path looks like for the next two to three years already. It is, as I said, more MIMO, more channel aggregation, extra features and services added to the system and getting somewhat faster. I don’t think, particularly, getting any better at coverage though. Is that true or is there stuff in there that will improve the coverage?

HB: Yes, coverage is a tough one from a technology viewpoint, because every event that I go to where we had a similar show of hands. I think everybody said, we want more coverage. And yet in 3GPP the technologists don’t really, address too much the coverage issue. There’s a bit in there, but not too much. So, lower frequency bands. So, you know 700 MHz is going to help. Of course for IoT, there’s been an awful lot of work in on the standards to make that far better coverage at lower data rates. So, some of that’s been addressed. But, for high speed internet access at greater coverage, I think that’s far more challenging.

WW: Yes. So why is that? Paul, have you not been making your voice heard loud enough in the standards bodies. Is it the operators that are not pushing forward the fact, that actually, coverage is more important than speed? Or is it actually that you think the current direction is okay?

PC: So, I think it depends on what is preventing the coverage and the deployment. You always get trade-offs with coverage versus capacity and all sorts of different things. So, we have had, made our voice heard, but I think it’s not easy to solve. This is essentially an infrastructure investment question. And particularly, for the kind of coverage that we’re talking about it’s beyond the current footprint. And we’re already have a roadmap which is pretty, aggressive in terms of deployment, but it is quite hard to make a good business case and a return on investment.

This is where the willingness of people to pay for that coverage is quite diminished. Even on rail, I mean it’s extremely expensive to cover rail lines because you typically can’t find an operating model that works with the rail companies just because of safety reasons. I mean, it’s all legitimate stuff and that means that therefore, you have, to find other ways of getting coverage which then can be very, very challenging and very expensive and would raise the cost of provision of services quite dramatically along the rail routes or along roads.

One thing that I think is interesting and hopefully, is being discussed a bit more in standardisation this time around, is about in-building coverage and the way that you get interoperability between different sets of infrastructure …. hopefully we will be able to provide a great experience across quite heterogeneous sets of infrastructure, potentially …

WW: So, is that using Wi-Fi in buildings essentially?


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PC: Potentially using Wi-Fi, but using third parties. So, you’ll find that for you Wi-Fi here in this building might be free. But it’s not of course. It’s generously offered to us by our host [Mathys & Squire], who is paying for all of the infrastructure. And there’s no reason why you can’t extend that model to mobile services. But it’s quite hard to do so using 3G. With 4G it’s quite hard to do but sort of almost achievable. So, that’s something that we’re really, interested in. So, that’s probably the more improving the edges of the coverage though it’s not getting complete ubiquity. So, in-building and out-building.

WW: So, we’ll come back to trains and to general questions of investment later. But let’s just pick up a bit more on the in-building side of things. So, being the devil’s advocate, isn’t this WiFi’s domain. So, who has heard of Google’s Project Fi? Okay, pretty, much everyone. For those who haven’t, it is Google essentially offering a service in the US at the moment and they’re going into to some regions of the US where you pay them as your mobile operator. They then try and direct your phone on to Wi-Fi and if they fail to do that they direct it on to a mobile network. And they have arrangements with a number of different mobile networks, so effectively you get kind of a national roaming type of capability. And they’re introducing features in phones and in Android and in particular in their own new Pixel phone, that allows you to do that better and to get on to a whole load of Wi-Fi systems without passwords that are part of their approach. So, is that the answer or is 5G going to have something different to cope with that sort of concept?

PC: I don’t think that’s the answer. You need to get the whole system working seamlessly together. So, my concept of 5G is more than just consumers, it is more than just mobile, and it is also more than just telcos. It’s the entire end to end system.

2G was successful in part because everything was thought of as a system and it was all under the control of operators.

So, now we need to think of the end to end system. And that includes the people that deliver these devices, the people who come up with chipsets, the people who write the applications, the people who do the service at the front end. All of these parties need to work in concert with network providers to get a good experience. And if you just look at this from the device end then it’s not going to be great. You’ll be chopping and changing and the experience won’t be as good - the feeling of ubiquity won’t be there.

If you just do it from the network, you’ll get the same problem so, you have to, do it together with the end to end service. And that’s why again, I think that that’s certainly in the NGMN requirements and certainly with some of the operators, that’s trying to push the way that you think of this as an end to end system so, that you can build something that is truly reliable. I don’t think you can build something that’s truly reliable without doing all, of those things. And that’s for consumer services to a certain extent. But when you move in to specific safety applications, specific verticals, for example automotive, then it becomes really, critical and then you need to work very closely with the automotive industry to understand exactly what they need. For example they don’t need 5 milliseconds or millisecond latency but they need a guaranteed 20 milliseconds.

So, that’s my understanding. You can’t do that today on the mobile network. You almost certainly couldn’t do that on a heterogenous Wi-Fi network across multiple locations. So, you would need some way of making the whole system work to support particular service requirements. And that’s I think where we need to get to. So, this is much more sophisticated than the KPIs we currently have. It’s not about a particular latency roundtrip


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time when the radio bearer is already up. So, you need to think a lot more sophisticated about what you’re trying to do because that’s the demands that we’re having on the network.

WW: Okay, so I’m going to move this on a bit now to the second subsystem that I characterised. So, it’s increasingly being said, that one of the most important element to 5G was internet of things. Which is interesting, because, actually, it appears to me to be the one that had least amount work done on it. But maybe others can talk about that.

So, of course we do have a lot of IoT stuff going on already. And, in particular, in the cellular space, there’s a number of different of IoT solutions of which NB-IoT appears to be the one with the most traction at this point in time, and, indeed, is being deployed right now. And there was a press announcement just today about systems that were going in, in Germany and the Netherlands and such like. So, that is happening.

There’s also of course, a raft of IoT solutions for unlicensed spectrum as well. So, there’s plenty of stuff going on in that space. So, my question to the panellists is, is 5G just going to take all that lot and so put a wrapper around it and say, this is all part of 5G now. Or, are we going to see a new radio solution for IoT? A completely new IoT solution that comes along in 5G at some point in time that changes all of that. So, I don’t know who wants to pick up. Moray, go for it.

MR: Yes. The NB-IoT work actually, came out of the GERAN committee because they were working on this behind the scenes as it were and then they came up with some good stuff. And the RAN committee decided they wanted to grab it. So, they did and then turned it into a variant of LTE. But the good news is that it was a brand new space to move in to. And it was really refreshing that they actually hit a completely different target because everything else that’s been going in the RAN on the radio side for the last 10 years has been just trying to squeeze more blood out of the turnip.

MR: To Paul’s point and your question to him about this, is the committee ignoring coverage versus speed. I think that that’s a really good question because you can improve coverage with technology but it’s damn hard. It’s much easier to just split the cell and that’s investment, it’s not technology. So, the committee’s been spending an awful lot of time, the majority, of its time, pushing the efficiency of radio. And then, all of a sudden, the focus moved to this IoT which was 10-year battery life - 100 bits per second, and really cheap!

So, that was quite amazing and they did it really fast. There are issues with the standard that I think will have to be worked out in time. But it really was a breath of fresh air to see all that energy - enabling a whole new industry as opposed to just trying to squeeze a bit more out of what we already had.

So, I think at that level what’s happened so far is really, good and now, whether that is going to get another level of attention, I don’t know. I mean, at, the moment, I think the target NB-IoT chip’s cost is about $5. I think that’s the target versus $10 or $15 for some of the standard chips.

So, it won’t be in a toaster I think. NB IoT will e serve a market that has a certain price point and maybe you’ll be able to chip your dog or something. But you’re not going to be putting it in paper cups and library books.


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WW: Is there anything going on in 5G that maybe is looking at that side, or do you think that will just be, either an evolution of NB-IoT, or some variant of the current other unlicensed type technology you see out there?

MR: I can’t see how you can evolve something that costs $5 to something that costs 5 cents or whatever it would need to be. I think NB-IoT will stand alone. And then whether anything else happens, unlicensed or not, I don’t know. I’ve a feeling it’s probably going to stay more like NB-Iot and that we’re not going see the existing NB IoT turn into something else.

WW: Joe?

JB: I’d just back that. NB IoT happened really quite quickly. And that’s really interesting to see. And I mean, I couldn’t answer from the technology perspective about what’s going on the 5G standards. But it seems like it’s going to be driven by what happens next. Who’s going to buy it? Who’s going to make some money out of it, will define probably what the direction of travel is. There is one vison of 5G is that it is enabling the networks to essentially hoover up more business in different spaces. I think this is an early example of that……so, it’s kind of an interesting test case, I think, really.

MR: Well that will drive it partly. I mean, if you can have a "find my dog app” at $2 a month or whatever, there’s a lot of dogs out there so …

WW: Yes.

[laughing]

WW: I did do some calculations on the likely return from NB-IoT. So, if we hit 50 billion IoT devices which is the kind of number we’re talking about, that’s roughly 10 devices per person. If you assume all those are on cellular (and that’s a heroic assumption because quite a few will probably be in your home on Wi-Fi or Bluetooth), and then you assume they’re all on a particular price point. And you add it all up and you assume it takes 10 years to arrive, this implies an ARPU growth of about 2 per cent a year. Which is certainly a lot better than a decline of 2 per cent a year. This is not a step-changed for the industry but nevertheless interesting.

HB: So, on the technology side I think the answer is it’s, definitely in the research realm. So, there’s been an awful lot of work on how do you design an air interface that can do really narrowband, long range, low bit rate, whilst the station also delivers high bit rates, over a shortish range? How do you make those two work together? So, there’s been an awful lot of work on that, on the wave forms, on the way that you deal with the modulation schemes. So, I think that is progressing, it will take a while for that to filter into the standards bodies because of the short time frames that they’re working to at, the moment.

I think what’s interesting on the financial side. So, who’s making money out of IoT today?

We are probably, one of the only companies who is actually, making money from all this. And we don’t make money out of really, clever stuff. We make money by integrating into our domestic appliances. For example our hoovers. So, we really, do hoover up here.

[laughing]


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HB: You’ve only got to pop along to John Lewis and have a look at our washing machines. And you look at the one that has the Wi-Fi chip in it and the one that hasn’t got the Wi-Fi chip in it and there is a significant difference in price. Because when people buy white goods they don’t want something that’s only going to last a year or two, they want to future proof it. So, people are actually buying in quite large quantities, smart white goods right now and they’re paying significant amounts of money for it. I’m not sure how many people, actually use the connectivity.

WW: But yes it’s not quite there.

HB: It’s like HD ready TVs. And washing machines connected to the home network.

So, I always wonder about this magic Ericsson figure of I don’t know how many billion connected devices. Maybe we will have that many connected devices but how many will be connecting to the cellular networks? My guess is, not as many as that 50 billion number. Because you’ve just got to look around your home. You can see already use cases of thermostats, you know the Nest type systems, the washing machines and all of the white goods. Our TVs have been connected for quite a long time now because people want to stream video over them. We’re now putting in the control systems for home IoT into the TV set so you control your home from your TV set. It’s a very obvious, logical things to do. But when you start looking at the market places, you know whether that be smart parking for instance, you can see that there’s a market for that. But is the price point the $1 chip, or is the price point, the 50-cent chip that can do multi hops that talks to a unit, that maybe is at $20. Or, you’re paying a couple of dollars a month for the main connectivity to the cellular network. And I think the industry has to really figure all this out because that in the end will determine which of the technologies goes in to the standards. No one’s going to create a 3GPP standard that you can’t make money off.

WW: Well maybe we’ll come back to that in bit. Paul, did you want to add anything?

PC: In terms of IoT, we think NB-IoT is the radio technology to go for now. And that means that I think it takes the wind out of the sails of any early 5G IoT radio standard. But I think there is room for a future there which will one be at some point that might be branded 5G IoT or “NB-IoT-plus” or whatever. Who knows….but there will always be an appetite to lower the cost and improve the capacity.

One of the key things, in terms of lowering the overall cost, is the overall end to end system cost again. We’ve got to try, as much as possible, to use shared infrastructure. Infrastructure is very expensive. That’s why NB-IoT is quite useful because it’s another radio bearer that you can put on a current site, a single RAN radio base station using the same antenna infrastructure. That’s why it’s quite good. And that way you can lower the overall system cost.

That’s why I think it will be useful to have an IoT solution works within the 3GPP ecosystem and environment. Particularly, when you want a reliable IoT, with things connected over the wide area, beyond the home. You can think of home as a specific use case because, generally, you actually, want to talk directly to that device.

So, I do think there will be a future variant. I don’t know the details and I don’t think it’s being discussed in detail. Now, I think scaling is really important. Scaling of the overall system and scaling of the functions that look after all these end devices. So, for example,


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we’ve got a smart city piece of work in Milton Keynes. MK Smart. And that uses LoRa. But the interesting thing is if you look at the actual architecture of it, it looks a lot like a 5G architecture where you have a data hub, an analytics platform, that then allows you to have third parties to work with it, to create and to run services with, and that is almost exactly, the same as the NGMN 5G Architecture model. You can look at standalone IoT platform deployments and see that that’s all going in the same direction as 5G.

I think we’re on the right direction. I think there will a future IoT variant which will have much greater, scale. Hopefully, it would truly allow the transformation you were talking about, getting chips into really, really, small items and then IoT will be transformational. And that’s where we all want to get it to. But that’s not going to happen in 2020, I think that’s a bit further down the line.

WW: So, I think what we’re hearing is, both in the below 6 GHz radio and IoT, for sure, of course things will continue to evolve, as they have been for many years. But we don’t see a brand new 5G solution in 2018 or 2020 in those spaces. It’s just what we’ve got now that’s going to improve and be market tested and evolved and enhanced during that period. Right, Stuart, you’ve put your hand up for a while.

SR: So, Stuart Revell from 5GIC. There was a few, kind of, things, going back on your talks that I wanted to address. The first one is coverage capacity and availability. And you talked about, you know, below 1 gig, maybe, 1 to 6 gigs away. I want to correct this. There is work going on in all of those areas and, especially, with the ability to split control and user plane. And going back to Paul’s point, the orchestration on systems to systems and networks and networks is absolutely key. So, and I think that’s a fundamental thing with 5G, the standards are being looked at. But a lot of this is in research right now. So, you may not find it in the standards yet. And as, industries come together it will evolve in to the standards area. But it’s definitely happening, and that is a very high criteria in terms of coverage, capacity and availability.

The areas that you mentioned like, tactile and, I think, let’s simplify that more. Massive IoT and critical IoT which is not just tactile. It’s a relationship like a connected car talking to infrastructure. Having to, and again, Paul mentioned it, deterministic characteristics. And our networks don’t have that today. So, the standard bodies are recognising this is a system of systems, very, much looking at verticals. So, that is a fundamental difference. And they are working at below 1 gig, 1 to 6 gig and millimetre waves. So, I think that needs to be corrected.

But a word of caution about R&D versus standards. You cannot measure where 5G is today on the standards work. Because some of the standards work may not start until four or five years’ time. It’s also about the long term vision and strategy and where we’re headed. It is fundamentally different, and I’ll mention again, the systems to systems network and network and networks. That is completely different to 4G. We’ve not seen that before. In fact, I’m chairing and organising a meeting with ETSI on 8th November bringing the transport and 5G industry together to define that. Because we are in a definition of it phase. So, we’ve got an opportunity to do that.

And my personal, opinion, I think most 5G networks will probably roll out with 4G radios initially. And it will be a core network orchestration system. And then, as and when, things become fit for purpose, 5G can be rolled out in certain areas. But, actually one fundamental thing about 5G, is recognising there is no one interface, whether it’s fixed


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wireless, satellite broadcast, that will do everything, it’s about how you leverage all of those assets – bringing them together and orchestrating them.

WW: Okay, we will come back to the system issue in 10 minutes or so. Simon Pike?

SP: Firstly, almost all, of the massive, IoT applications require very good coverage. And any development of 5G that is not incremental on 4G will not get that coverage, until 2025 at least. That’s the figure in the Commission’s 5G action plan and that is pretty, optimistic. And those applications will not wait until then. So, they will be delivered, if not by narrowband IoT, by a development of it. Which is effectively, incremental. Or if not, if that’s not possible, by some other technology. So, I don’t think there’s much space for IoT, beyond the evolution of the NB- IoT and the unlicensed technologies for a very long time.

On the question of, what is the definition of 5G. I was thinking back to the definition of 4G and 3G. So, and they’re effectively, political. So, if you look in some definitions, you will find that LTE is part of 3G. DECT is part of 3G and analog AMPS was at one point part of 3G as well. And that was all due to the combination for standards and the political thing. So, my prediction is that, 5G will be what the industry has ready between 2018 to 2020 to be packaged as a massive incremental step in 2020.

WW: Yes. I think many of us would agree with that. So, we haven’t yet talked about the millimetre wave stuff. We’ll do that in a moment. I haven’t asked you to put your hands up for a bit. So, it’s a pretty good point to ask. But setting that aside, if we’re just looking at radios below 6 GHz and IoT. By, and large, I think what I’ve been hearing is that there will not be a new 5G moment in 2020 in that space.

SR: Yes, it will.

WW: But it will certainly be a …

SR: It will be an orchestration across networks.

WW: Well let’s just see what we …

SR: Which don’t need standards.

WW: No, well I think, yes, so. Let’s talk about that later.

[laughing]

WW: I was interested if people tend to buy in to that. So, I’m going to ask you, do you believe that the 2020-ish 5G, will, actually, as we pertain to below 6 GHz radio and IoT, just be, what we’re developing now. A narrow band IoT enhanced and 4G enhanced. Or, contrarily, do you think that, actually, there’ll be something new and very specific that we can point to and say, that is different and that is 5G at around those timescales? So, who is for the evolutionary role by 2020?

Audience: Most of audience raise hands

WW: That looks like pretty, much everyone. And who is for the new, something new is going to happen by then?


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Audience: 3 raise hands

WW: So, at the, moment, a fairly, strong view that actually, for those elements at least, 5G will be what we have got now evolved slightly to 2020.

But we’ve also heard a number of points that, actually by 2025, things may be completely different. And, of course, you know we will expect more evolution during that period. So, things will certainly change. I want to take us on to millimetre wave stuff for a bit now, because that’s the shiny headline of 5G. It’s the gigabit per second or more. It’s the super duper, wonderful, new, massive-MIMO technology and it’s all new frequency band stuff and everything else. So, what do we expect that happen to that? Where do we expect it to be used? What is it for? Who wants to chip in to start us off?

MR: It’s interesting that you say that ‘1 gigabit per second’ is the target here. Well, Keysight make base-station emulators. That’s one of the big things we do as a company. And we’ve measured 1.6 gigabits per second using four carrier LTE with 80 MHz of bandwidth. That was emulated because we couldn’t find a device that fast. But we have measured a real device at 1 gigabit per second - a commercial device, using three carrier aggregation, four by four MIMO, two carriers and two by two on the other.

WW: Is that a handset?

MR: Yes. So, we can already do a gigabit per second with 60 MHz of bandwidth at whatever frequency you want between 450 MHz and 3.5 GHz.

WW: So, why do you want millimetre waves?

[laughing]

MR: So, why do we want millimetre waves? Okay.

The technical answer is, because although you can do these things at low frequencies, realistically, they’re not going to actually work very often. Because, to get those sorts of rates you have to be in ridiculously good radio conditions. Which basically means you need to have an isolated cell because as soon as you bring anything else in, the noise levels and the interference levels are such that it will not work at those sorts of rates. And the key to it is space because at low frequency, pretty much everything is omni-directional. Base-stations are pretty much sectorised and mobiles have pretty much omni-directional antennas, even though they try not to be. But, that’s what they do. You’d be lucky in a mobile device like this, to get more than a 3 dB variation in a 360-degree rotation. So that means that the signals are continuously interfering with each other, and therefore you’re not going to see very high performance.

Now, when you move to millimetre wave, everything changes. Because suddenly you’ve got a new dimension you can play with - which is space. At millimetre wave frequencies you’ve got two things happening. One of them is bad and one of them is good. The bad one is that your path loss is typically a 30 dB worse link budget because that’s just the laws of physics. You can’t argue with that. Basically, you’ve got a much worse propagation condition and the only way you can fix that is to have higher gain antennas. And the only way you can do that is to have multiple array antennas. Fortunately, because it’s high frequency, the antennas are small. So, magically, everything works.


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To operate realistically at millimetre wave you have to have antenna arrays at both ends of the link which by, definition, means they are directional, which also now means that the signals that you’re communicating with are no longer interfering with each other. So, suddenly, you can do some amazing stuff. And I’ve seen a video that was produced by Wilocity about three years ago where they demonstrated in a room, roughly this size, 36 bidirectional 802.11ad 60 GHz links. And they were all operating independently of each other and the average bit rate in the room was 3 gigabits per square metre. And the aggregate in the room was 100 gigabits per second. And that was with yesterday’s technology, sitting on the bench, doing nothing special. Now if you had done that at 5 GHz it wouldn’t have worked.

WW: So, why don’t we just adopt that technology?

MR: Well you could, but obviously, that technology is fantastic indoors.

WW: Isn’t that where the demand is?

MR: Well, yes, and it’s really hard to get that to not work indoors. Especially in the earlier systems with the steering antennas. You take that system outside it stops working. You might be lucky, you might have a line of sight but basically, you’re in a much more, sparse environment. So, that’s the challenge, at millimetre frequencies, as soon as you start talking about devices rather than you know CPs and fixed networks indoors, the problem gets much harder because now your environments are very sparse, the signals are really, narrow. And as soon as you pick up the device, you’ll probably put your finger on the antenna.

WW: That was the iPhone’s problem, wasn’t it?

MR: Yes.

[laughing]

MR: Nailed it. So, I think that’s where the challenges for me are going to be in millimetre wave. You could make it work but to make it work, you’re probably going to have, to have a pretty dense network and you’re going to have to have the ability to do spatial switching with steerable antennas and you’ve got the blocking problem.

WW: And what sort of range do you think we are talking about?

MR: Verizon is targeting a kilometre for their fixed system which is probably reasonable. Realistically, what happens once you get past the line of sight or the first or second bounce, things get pretty chaotic. So you’re probably looking at every street corner or something like that. And you need to have two or three possibilities because when you move in this environment at these frequencies, the best signal could suddenly switch to a different direction. And so, you need to have some redundancy in the radio.

WW: Yes. Okay. Howard?

HB: So, as you probably know, Samsung have been working in this space for about five years now. So, one of our research labs in the US, basically asked a question internally. And they said, what’s going to be next. So, we were looking at LTE advance, we were looking at the


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fully dimensional MIMO that we’ve got working, at the, moment and it was all kind of, what else can we do? And we are running out of things to do increase spectrum efficiency.

We’re now at the stage where, some of the figures are just amazing of what we can get. But as Morey said, it’s only in the right environment. And, in many environments you don’t get that throughput, you know. We talk a lot about massive MIMO. That only works in certain environments where you can get these multiple independent streams. It doesn’t work everywhere.

So, we were forced to then say, well the only space left that we’ve got is to move into frequencies where there’s wider channel bandwidths. I think the concept of lots of empty free spectrum, is a little bit misguided. I think there’s a lot of discussions that have been going on over the years, about spectrum availability. It’s interesting, that in the UK at 28 GHz. So, I was, actually at, a meeting with the chairman of the FCC last week and we were discussing the way that the FCC have moved really, really, quickly in freeing up and allocating that spectrum.

It’s something for our friends in Ofcom, obviously, Joe hasn’t got his Ofcom hat on today. Our friends in Ofcom haven’t moved quite as quickly to allocate spectrum in the UK. But the FCC moved quickly, because they saw that if they freed up the spectrum, that would create a commercial environment that could help grow the industries. Whether they’re successful or not, we’ll have to wait and see. So, we were in quite a good place because we had our research labs looking at this, we have spectrum availability coming up and then the third piece which we had our friends in Verizon Wireless, saying, actually we’ve got a problem with fibre. Not, that you know, the fibre deployment that we got in, everyone loves it. But we have problems in a lot of areas in deploying it in an economically feasible manner.

So, the only way we’re going to get that last half mile is by some form of radio. But we don’t really want a radio system that just does radio local loop. We want something that’s going to provide us with the next generation of mobile coms at the same time. So, can you design us the technology that does both? And this is where we are with 5G at, the moment.

So, we’ve got systems up and running at, the moment, in 28 GHz. We’ve got demo systems in the US. We’re getting kind of anywhere between 7 and 20 gigabits a second depending on what environments you are, where you are. We’ve got mobility working. So, a lot of people have said, that you can have a car driving down at street at 28 GHz because the directional antennas can’t track it fast enough. We’ve got all of that working. So, we know it works. We’ve got demonstration mobile devices. They aren’t complete solutions yet, but we have got antenna arrays in demo phones that we can check to see whether, when you put your hand on the phone, it stops working. And we can see ways where it doesn’t stop working and we may get a slight decrease in data rate and the antennas do clever things and move around, electronically tuned, of course.

So, we can see solutions now appearing. So, I think there’s a bright future for the millimetre wave communications. It’s going to be really, interesting to see how successful they are in the US at 28 GHz. We need to sort out a spectrum across Europe because if we have a different band in every single country in Europe it’s not going to work. You know, it’s not going to be economically feasible.


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WW: But is this a technology looking for a solution? You started off by saying, you went there because it looked like an interesting place to go to get more, without determining whether we need more. Paul, what’s EE’s take on millimetre wave? Are you keen to roll it out?

PC: I think the early deployments of 5G will be in the sub 6 GHz. But, I mean, picking up Joe’s point earlier on. I think it’s much, more than just the radio. Just look forward, as I said, up to 2035. And data demand will continue growing and growing and growing. You know, you could argue that at some point people will stop wanting to do stuff, it could be true, but I don’t personally believe it. I don’t think anyone in their lives have seen data demand drop. The growth slows and goes up and slows again, but it’s always growing. So, over the very long term there will be need for more capacity within the network.

You could do it in a number, of ways. You can have more cells, or more spectrum, or better efficiency. One of the things with efficiency, we probably need to be more sophisticated. I think Morey’s point, you probably need to take that even further and say, it’s the actual application, back to the point it’s the end to end system. Yes, application, bits per second, per hertz, per metre squared and possibly even think about the number of devices per metre squared or reliability as another. You need to think of all, of those things. And that’s your KPI. Not just bits per hertz in a perfect cell, because that’s not the real world,and if it’s undeployable, then it’s kind of pointless.

In the very, long term, you need all, of these things:ou’ll need more cells and you’ll need more spectrum. And that will include millimetre wave. With millimetre wave, you will need more cells because they’ll need to be smaller. So, it’s kind of the two elements go together both smaller cells and millimetre wave spectrum.

WW: But that’s long term?

PC: That’s the long term, probably,, the second phase of a 5G deployment. I wouldn’t say we could deploy millimetre wave as a consumer early. I think there’s a lot of things that need to be solved, such as: people moving around and shadows that we were just talking about. There are many issues to solve that it’s going to take a while. But I think that’s why everyone’s interested in it because a lot of people who are doing this are engineers and its technology. And it’s really interesting because it’s fundamentally different.

WW: Do you think we’re sort of, 10 years away, that kind of timescale for this stuff?

PC: Ten years. We’re in 2016. I think, yes, yes. That kind of timescale, I would say. I think there’ll be, particular, user cases. So, the fixed wireless access one is a much, more controllable environment because fixed things don’t move which helps. You’ll probably find that trees grow which will cause a problem. But generally, things, don’t move that much. So, those particular fixed use cases are probably earlier on. So, that’s my kind of thinking for millimetre wave.

WW: Okay. Joe?

JB: So, I think I agree very much, with that. I’m an engineer. My PhD is in beam forming. So, I’m exactly one of those people you are talking about Paul, which is, you know, I’m kind of really excited by the concept. And you know I would applaud companies like Samsung for pouring R&D funding in to what is really, quite a challenging thing. It does feel like it’s


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quite a way before you get that full version of that coming in to the deployment space. But I’m kind of, a spectator in this really.

I think, just picking up on to what Howard said about the FCC check. What’s really, interesting is Tom Wheeler and the FCC, have been really, really very gung-ho about 5G, in a really big way. And I think it’s quite interesting to contrast that with Europe, not just with the UK, but with Europe. And it’s quite interesting to contrast that with the views in the room. You know, we’ve just had a vote where everyone said, it’s going to be incremental, etc. etc. And yet, you’ve got the FCC going, ‘this is going to happen, we’re going to back it, we are fully backing this horse, not only that we’re going to get out of the way and if it takes …’, you know, he made an interesting point about infrastructure. You know, if there’s going to be loads and loads of small cells, let’s get all the regulations changed so we can get them deployed. And I think that’s really, really interesting. And in many ways, I think it’s a real bet you know, frankly, on that technology.

But in some ways, you’ve got to look at well, what’s the downside of making that bet. And so, I do think it’s really interesting to contrast that position with where we are in Europe and if we do want to take a sort of forward-looking stance in supporting digital industries etc. etc., maybe there is something that you know is needed to be looked at in that direction.

Please do note that I’m not talking there as a member of Ofcom.

[laughing]

WW: Interesting point. Equally I recall that the FCC said, that TV white space was going to be the most amazing transformation ever to spectrum. And the Commissioners, especially, were saying that is the most important thing that’s ever happened in our lifetime. And we know, TV whitespace has achieved nothing so far. It may change. But equally, Joe, I do share the view of, “what is there to lose in doing that?” Yes, it maybe won’t transpire but at least you’re giving it a chance to do something that it might not otherwise do. Morey?

MR: Yes, just going back to the point that Howard made about the frequency band. We cannot afford to have every geography pick its own frequency for this stuff. If you look at the world’s most successful radio technology (apart from GSM of course which is right up there). But in terms of data, it’s Wi-Fi, which is roughly 10 to 12 times the data carrying capacity of cellular.

The reason it’s successful is because right at the beginning it was one frequency band which was available pretty much worldwide. And then a second band became available at 5 gigs. And then a third band at 60 gigs which is 8 GHz wide. And, it’s ubiquitous. It doesn’t matter where you go in the world. It’s like, when I arrived here, you are offered the Wi-Fi code wherever you go.

So, what I’m concerned about with the way things are going in this early millimetre wave space for 5G, is that we’re not seeing that level of spectrum consensus. At least at the beginning of GSM we had one band. At the beginning of UMTS we had one band. At the beginning of 4G, I don’t know how many we had (20 or so)…

[laughing]


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MR: Right now, there’s 53. As of two or three weeks ago. But the point is, there was a focus at the beginning. And I think the focus right now is being driven by the Korean’s, the Japanese and the Americans. And our ability to deploy 28 GHz is limited because of all of the backhaul infrastructure. So, I think we’ve got a real issue here because you will not be able to do this millimetre wave stuff efficiently unless there’s a worldwide scale. And right now, the worldwide scale for millimetre wave is owned by 802.11ad. And the only way I can see cellular taking advantage of that would be to do a 60-GHz version of LAA. Which is not out of the question. But the other thing I’m reminded of is, there was a French novelist in the 1800s called Flaubert and he had this saying, ‘perfection is the enemy of the good’. And my concern is that 3GPP will try to gold plate 802.11ad and fix all the problems with it. And we’ll have the HyperLAN of 802.11ad wireless LAN. And we know what happened to HyperLAN.

MR: Yes, the technology needs to be good enough. Now, we have 802.11ad. It’s not yet been successful on a mass scale which is interesting. Now, is that because it’s not good enough or because it’s not needed? I don’t know. There is a bit of both going on there. But it’s a predictor I think of what will be the opportunity for 5G. And it hasn’t happened yet. And it’s seven years older than 5G. So, there’s a lot of ‘ifs’ in there.

WW: Okay, so we’ve got about 15 minutes left and I’m keen to circle back on to systems and on to trains and bigger scale of how we’re going to do things. Dean, I’ll let you in, in a bit, but I just want to get us on to the next bit. And we talked about Wi-Fi. So, system of systems - are we expecting a future where we roam seamlessly between cellular and Wi-Fi and IoT is all thrown in there. I think, most people will say, yes, of course, why not? But it’s starting to happen now. To Paul’s point, it’s a bit clunky because it’s done mostly in the device rather than at a system level. But things are improving there. And is that really the 5G opportunity? Is it that it’s all these systems are going to work better? And if so, who is going to run that? Is it the mobile network operators? Is it Google running something that sits above all of these kind of things? Is it completely dispersed and not run by anybody but just kind of some, wonderful, self-organising system?

MR: Uber!

WW: Uber.

[laughing]

WW: So, I think the system concept is great but what does it mean? Does it mean the mobile operators run everything or does it mean something more than that? I don’t know who wants to dive in to that? Okay. Go on.

HB: To some extent there’s two elements. There’s kind of what you need to do in standards and what you can do without standards. So, if you look at what you can do without standards right now. There’s a mass of open source software out there. So, Samsung have a virtualised core network with SK at, the moment, running on LTE in Korea. And that’s running attached to their commercial network. So, we know it works. There are some issues.

So, ETSI and NFV have been doing a lot of work on how do you manage and provision and control those networks. Security is a massive one. So, security gets really, interesting because the ‘what if’s’ get really scary. So, the advantage of, or the proposed advantages


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of, all, of these systems, is that I can get a bit of software, I can put it on Google’s data centre or on an Amazon or a Microsoft cloud. I can then run my whole network, hey presto, it’s really, cheap. But the ‘what if’, is that, what if somebody finds out the IP address in the inside of the network and then hacks that? And then all, of a sudden, let’s say, I’m a Vodafone, and the hacker gets access to every Vodafone subscriber in the UK. Denial of service attacks, you know, horrible things can happen. So, those are getting addressed. You know, the industry is well, aware of those concerns and trying to get around them.

WW: But then is it the operator or is it someone more than that?

HB: Well, in the end it has to be the operator. The operator will run the service. They have, to run the service.

WW: And not Google?

HB: And not Google. My position, is it’d be highly unlikely that Google would run that service. It may be running in a Google data centre. And Google may be tweaking things to allow them a slice. So, slicing is going to get really, interesting. So, the way that you slice the network up and you allocate slices, I think that it is, that’s really, one of the really, interesting new areas coming along.

And I think it’s those things that are going to drive 5G, rather than radio. I mean, obviously, we’ve got millimetre wave side, we’ve got increased capacity. But I think the big revolutionary bit, is going to be the core network bit. I think that’s the bit that’s going to change.

PC: Oh, yes, I was just going to say the same thing actually. And that needs to be end to end.

But while we need this system to system we need control and we need a core network. And you need to maintain the security privacy of the people that are using it. And in terms of the ways that you might optimise a certain service or application, you need to understand what the device is doing. You need a certain amount of trust there. And I think that’s where we as operators and using analytics can do that. And we can work within that trust.

WW: But is this just in a way improved plumbing for the operators?

PC: Pardon?

WW: Is just improved plumbing for the operators? Will consumers notice that if there’s a network function virtualisation or if the network is sliced?

PC: So, the network function virtualisation, that for me is good housekeeping. That’s kind of like, how to run an efficient network. There is an interest here in terms of if you can build distributed compute environment. I think this is where a 5G core network is really important because then you can get some very flexible core network functions you can use around the network. The reason why that’s important is, say, for a guaranteed latency requirement where you need functions moved to the edge to the edge of the network. You can’t do that today very easily;it doesn’t work very well in 4G. You end up with people anchored off a point in the network and then as they move around and the device is on the


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network for days and days and days you end up anchored in the wrong place and then all the performance and benefits go away. There are performance perception benefits are distributing. So, there are things that don’t work today with 4G.

The operator has a lot to play in the service from a consumer side, we have the relationship with the consumers in terms of the service today. We have the whole retail and a customer service side to it. I think it possibly it is different in the verticals, as in, working with sector specialists. I mean, automotive, is a good example, if it’s health you want, you might want a health organisation to front up the service to the end user. That might be the right way to do it as you probably need expertise for that particular area. For example, I don’t think Google would run the health service. They might run a lifestyle service but it would be a health provider or some expert in that area that could do that.

WW: And we will hear more about verticals in the next debate. But I could challenge you and say didn’t the operator say the same thing about location management? It’s never going to be Google doing that because they couldn’t access the network and they couldn’t access the location. The operators were going to handle the location management services. Going back 10 years, there was lots of conferences on location management. All the operators said this is our important, crown jewels information. We know where the mobiles are. We’re going to offer a whole load of services, we’re going to monetise them. And, actually, of course, they didn’t because they moved less quickly than Google who did a dirty work around of just using Wi-Fi and a quick drive by to know the base-station’s codes and then offered services over the top. And, of course, actually, now, anything that’s location based is through Google or similar kind of services.

PC: That was before my time, so I have to say …

[laughing]

PC: And , back to security and privacy. I think the operators to a certain extent are core to that. Google can play fast and loose, but I think that is our strength.

WW: Yes, that may come back to be your core strength.

PC: Yes, and so, we need to build on that and, also, make sure we don’t ever lose trust with our customers. That’s something that’s really important. So, I’m quite glad to a certain extent that we haven’t overstepped what was right because it still gives us some opportunities in the future. And I still think that, sort of owning the customer information and their financial information and being trusted with that is really important for us.

WW: Okay. Morey

MR: Yes, just on this whole business of what’s going to happen with the core network evolution. There’s clearly a whole lot of stuff that can be done to make things more efficient. A bit like, what’s happened in the radio. The radio used to be pretty dumb, back in the day of AMPS. And now, look at it, it’s incredible. All this flexibility. And the equivalent is now being talked about in the network. And I’m really concerned about what that means for the robustness of the network. People don’t typically talk about complexity. And I think it’s a subject in its own right, but it doesn’t really, have a science behind it.


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I think what we’re going to be building, if we go from these dedicated boxes that do very specific things that can be tested to death - we know they work, okay, they’re not efficient - but that isn’t necessarily a problem. High efficiency anything is highly complex. And when you get to the high ends of efficiency in any system that’s what happens.

I’d like you to write down a book to go and read. It’s called ‘Normal Accidents’ written by Charles Perrow in 1986. He was from Yale Aand he wrote up his views on four industries. It was the shipping industry, the airline industry, nuclear industry and DNA research - in the future obviously back in 86. He looked at them and tried to figure out why do these industries sometimes go catastrophically wrong? And it’s not down to operator error. It’s because the systems were designed, fundamentally, with complex non-linear interactions. And when you build something like that it will fail and when it fails you will have no clue what happened.

Now, I would like to add the future of telecoms to that list because it’s becoming a critical industry and if we turn it from being highly regulated in terms of the functions and tested and robust, to something which is effectively a bit like self-modifying code I think we’re going to be in for some inevitable disasters that we’re not going to recover from. So, I think, we really, need to think really carefully about this new layer.

Now, the radio people have already done it. They’ve discovered what they can and can’t do and it’s not a critical thing. If it fails, if the radio fails, hey we’ve got a bit error, we’ve lost a packet. If the network fails there’s real consequences there.

WW: Joe.

JB: I think some of the points you were alluding to were about kind of market evolution really, and the way the market is going to evolve. And I think we do need to be very, very, alive to the way that the market is going to evolve. Over time, you know, things have changed from a mobile operator, essentially having complete access at the vertical kind of chain all the way through from spectrum down to poles and fibre etc. That ecosystem has changed and will continue to change. I think there’s other changes as you say, like the players, the over the top players etc. etc. coming in. And I think the other thing that’s interesting is, we’ve got to a position where we’ve got established mobile networks with very consolidated positions giving good coverage. And as you start talking about a millimetre wave spectrum you know you’re back to sort of talking about hotspots and things. And Wi-Fi has actually, played outdoors, quite successfully and, you know, was critical when the iPhone came along in the early days of the iPhone. And I think you can see things like that enabling the more, granular, small scale players. Could be important with this picture. If you are talking about kind of, consumer grade equipment that you hang up and stick a fiver into. And it’s technology is, you know, you talking Moray about LAA as a technology which essentially shares unlicensed spectrum.

[laughing]

JB: But equally can use the licensed spectrum or pooled spectrum. You know, there’s a range of things there that are really important to think about when we consider the market for the next 10 years. Which I think is something we’ll discuss, hopefully, at the next debate. But I think it’s quite a rich discussion.

WW: Dean, I’m going to let you in.


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DB: Okay. I’m Dean Bubley from Disruptive Analysis. I have, to say, I am unconvinced with a lot of the stories I hear around network slicing and orchestration. Every time I look at NFV and related areas it seems to be getting more complex with more stakeholders. Whether it’s organisational issues in carriers or elsewhere. And I also think that it fails to acknowledge the mentality of the application of device developers who have to design future products and services either to be able to work offline where there is no network which there will always be some of the time, no coverage. Or, multiple networks that they can choose between and arbitrage across. And so trying to create an end to end system in either of those situations doesn’t work because I think the application developer or the device developer, which is roughly the same thing, will be the kingmaker here and act fast.

WW: Okay. So, I’m going to ask for a couple of more shows of hands and then as Joe said, we are very nearly at point for the networking time. I don’t want to cut into that too much. So, first of, all, if you buy in to this concept - just buy into it for the moment please -that 5G …

[laughing]

WW: … is somehow going to be a system of systems and it’s going to bring into play Wi-Fi and cellular and other such things, who thinks that that is going to be run by the mobile network operators. Everything’s going to be subsumed into their empire, they’re going to look after that. Or, conversely, who believes that, actually, it’s, going to be somebody completely different. Either a Google or a new entrant or someone like that.

MR: Or a city.

WW: … or a city, yes. Someone different. So, who would go for the mobile network operators as being the key player in that space? About four of you. And who would go for someone else? Okay. That’s very telling.

Now, I did promise that we’d come back and talk about investment in things like trains and other areas where it’s just proven too hard, to Paul’s point, too expensive. Not commercial. Too many barriers. Some very valid like safety cases. And so, we haven’t got time to discuss it, but a quick question again to you all is, who believes that actually, somehow, 5G will solve that in a commercial way. Or, alternatively who thinks that actually, we need essentially government-led intervention to make that kind of thing happen in some shape or form and that’s a good role for the government to do that? So, who thinks that will evolve and will happen through 5G?

No.

Seems that Joe has a role in getting out there and sorting this!

[laughing]

WW: Okay. So, I’m not going to sum up for too long because I think that you can draw your own conclusions from what you’ve heard. But it seems to me that what we … what we’ve kind of talked about and, I think, by, and large, as an audience, agreed on through shows of hands and similar, is that, actually, what we’re going to see in 2020 is really an evolution of what we’ve got now. It’s going to be better 4G. Narrowband IoT is going to come along and be tested. We may have some other IoT stuff and we may see the first vestiges of


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network functional virtualisation type stuff going on. But there’s not going to be some new wondrous 5G that’s going to change the world.

But we do expect that by about, we don’t know when, 2025 or beyond, things like millimetre wave systems coming in to play in whatever shape or form that they do.

Hopefully, the core stuff will finally be worked out without too many disasters happening by that stage. And, the world will be starting to look like a different place that will evolve to. But it’s very hard to track down what that is. So, all the people who said 5G is going to appear by 2017or 2018, no 2018 and 2019, they’re probably smoking some pipe. Thank you.

[applause]

END OF TRANSCRIPT

The CW 5G Debate in association with the NIC › media › uploads › ... · 2017-09-27 · The CW...

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Transcript of The CW 5G Debate in association with the NIC › media › uploads › ... · 2017-09-27 · The CW...