5G is here, available on all three major U.S. carriers across much of the country, but network operators and vendors are still mostly telling us to imagine what 5G will deliver versus what it is actually delivering today.
Dozens of industry executives speaking at this week’s GSMA Thrive event urged consumers and enterprises to imagine the possibilities, citing future benefits and yet-to-be-seen capabilities that are almost completely theoretical. Most of the 5G use cases envisioned by these effective proprietors of 5G are still under development and relegated to labs.
Operators and network vendors have a lot of work to do before the dream of a fourth industrial revolution is fueled and made possible by 5G, as has been pointed to by countless telecom and enterprise executives ad nauseum. The leaders at most of these companies are, to be fair, relatively forthright about what 5G is today and what is yet to come.
The Decade of 5G Is Upon Us
“The transition we’re in right now is profound, the beginning of a decade of 5G,” David Christopher, EVP & GM at AT&T Mobility, said during his keynote at the event. The industry is still in “the first inning,” he said.
“We are past the academic, the theoretical, and we’re up and running as an industry with large nationwide networks, built on the foundation of hundreds of billions of dollars in the U.S. across capital and spectrum investments. We all know we’ve been talking about what 5G can do for years. Now it’s time to execute as an industry,” Christopher said.
“5G is going to stretch our imagination of what is possible and, I dare say, challenge even the most innovative amongst us to dream what is really possible in the next decade,” he said. “The elasticity of 5G’s capabilities to grow with our imagination is one of the most exciting things that we’re going to see in our lifetimes.”
Christopher referenced unmet opportunities in the wearables category with augmented reality (AR), encouraging the virtual audience to imagine real time access to pertinent information, a technology that will push video into our surroundings “so characters appear next to us, and Elmo can read our children bedtime stories on the couch.”
The potential scenarios in enterprise are endless as well, he claimed. “I don’t think it is a reach to say that we as an industry will help transform American business with 5G.”
Operators Still Searching for Killer App
Kyle Malady, EVP and CTO at Verizon, said he is regularly asked to define the killer app for 5G but the search for that answer continues. “We don’t know. What we’re doing is we’re putting out capabilities, as we call them currencies and platforms, to people, and people can use those for their businesses, for their personal use, so they can drive efficiencies, they can do better, they can move the world forward. And so I never have a, I don’t have an answer for it, I don’t know what the killer app is,” he said.
Absent a definitive answer to that recurring question, Malady said he is confident that “the capabilities that we’re bringing to the table can really help enterprises move things forward.”
Elsewhere during the event, John Saw, EVP of advanced and emerging technologies at T-Mobile US, said his job is to fuel the 5G pipeline with new uses for enterprises and consumers. There are many “exciting examples of what we’re seeing around the corner,” he said.
Saw also highlighted wearables as a category ripe for 5G, one that will deliver information in real time into the user’s field of vision. “Humans are built to operate in three dimensions, but computing has forced us into a two-dimensional world,” he said. “Mixed reality can change this, giving us a more natural, intuitive way to work with a low latency, high capacity 5G network.”
He went on to mention 5G’s ability to support holographic video as “the next frontier in how we communicate real time with each other” and drones for emergency response and robotic, contactless delivery.
Intel Paves 5G Foundation
Almost every industry, including manufacturing, industrial, retail, health care, and media, will benefit from 5G, according to Asha Keddy, corporate VP at Intel. “Even with COVID, we’ll start with industrial and manufacturing, and then over time we’re expected to have the other industries catch up, with media being a big one. If you actually think about it, this is the next Industrial Revolution, as we have Industry 4.0 and 5G merging together,” she said.
Framing 5G, in concert with many of her peers as evolutionary and revolutionary, Keddy said the evolutionary aspects involve backward compatibility with 4G LTE and more mobile broadband. “The revolutionary aspects of 5G are now beginning to roll out with the standardization of Release 16,” including support for private networks, heightened reliability, local sensing, edge computing, and media, she said.
“All of these together will start shaping how industries and enterprises change, and are built and evolve,” Keddy concluded.
Nokia CTO Sets Realistic Expectations
Mike Murphy, CTO for Nokia in North and South America, set some realistic expectations for where the industry is on 5G now and what’s coming next. “From a bigger picture perspective we see that 5G will start to dominate in about 2024, at least in terms of number of devices deployed,” he said during his presentation at the event.
“While the focus now is on mobility, it will shift to verticals somewhere around 2023. That doesn’t mean that nothing happens between now and 2023, it just means that in terms of large-scale impact, more complex solutions, we see them coming a few years later,” Murphy said.
5G is “quite disruptive” as a standalone technology, but releasing and integrating it alongside a confluence of multiple technology shifts occurring at the same time is a “perfect storm,” he said. The rise of open radio access networks (RAN), complete network virtualization, and the emergence of cloud computing in telecom networks’ back-office systems, mobile edge computing, and network functions, are all converging as 5G takes hold, Murphy said.
“Going forward, we all believe that the true promise of 5G is in new use cases, in particular in vertical industries,” he said.
“We’ve had a great start in 5G. There’s been a lot of world firsts in the U.S. We have great regulatory support, but there’s still more to be done,” Murphy concluded. “We need more mid-band [spectrum], and we need it earlier just to solve the capacity problems that we know about, let alone the ones we don’t know about.”
Watch this video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z5vxRC8dMvs