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By the end of 2017, the expectation was that 4G was already the main mobile network in Brazil, but what makes telecommunication entrepreneurs rub their hands is fifth generation mobile broadband, 5G.
By then, countries and multinationals are rushing to shift the hub of decisions around the network that will have download speeds greater than 1 Gbps (gigabits per second) and allow robots to talk to each other.
The G1 has talked to experts about what the 5G will look like, the way it goes into operation, and what national and corporate interests are involved.
“5G opens up more opportunities than our society has ever seen, transforming connectivity into possibilities for everyone,” Ronan Dunne, president of Verizon, told the Mobile World Congress in San Francisco.
The executive’s statement from the largest US telecommunication company is indicative of the excitement of the industry, which gives 5G an injection of $ 12.3 trillion into the world economy and the creation of 22 million businesses by 2025.
Ari Lopes, an analyst at Ovum, explains the source of the euphoria. If 2G scanned the voice transmission, 3G opened the doors to the mobile internet and the 4G has raised the mobile speed, the 5G will allow:
- High download speeds
- Minor connection delay
- More “talk” between machines
- “Division” of the network into pieces to prioritize services that are more important
The average internet speed in the world today is 7.2 Mbps (megabit per second). The 5G will raise the limit. In equipment tests that could be used in the future, Verizon and Qualcomm have reached 1 Gbps, more than 140 times the current rates as measured by Akamai. On the other hand, the response time between connected machines and services will fall.
“To have a standalone car, you will need a car talking to the other directly, because if they are on a collision course, you can not get one, go to the cell tower and then to another in order to avoid the beat, “comments Lopes.
“There is a plethora of applications. It will have infrastructure suited to different scenarios, from virtual reality and high precision agriculture to cloud computing, because it will be possible to leave things in the cloud, like machine processing, and transmit with high speed to the device, “says Agostinho Linhares, broadcasting manager of the National Telecommunications Agency (Anatel).
“5G is where mobile operators want to go,” says Lopes. Until then, companies work on network virtualization (server management is done by software) and LTE investment better (the 4G will serve as a 5G support network).
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The third point is to offer Internet service of things (IoT), which, in the market, is one of the main bets to make 5G possible. Today, operators connect the card machines, monitor trucks and vehicles, but there is not much besides. The idea is that 5G offers a tool to connect other things at lower costs.
Another feature that the next technology of connection will have is the slice network, that allows to allocate pieces of the network for certain applications.
“Videoconferencing gets X’s of capacity, water meters and electric power from homes gain another a part …,” he explains.
“It has nothing to do with ‘data shapping’, which was to take an application and slow down its traffic. the network will be 80% available Imagine a remote surgery It has to have 99.9999% reliability.
For Dunne from Verizon, the key benefits of IoT solutions will be business-to-business. The reason, he explains, is that companies use things’ internet solutions to manage infrastructure, monitor vehicles, optimize energy usage, and make integrations between machines and systems.
International standard
Until the 5G signal begins to be picked up by smartphones and drones, the network will go through at least two international rounds of definitions. Next year, the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) defines which standards of latency, data transfer and other attributes a network must present to be called 5G.
In 2019, the debate in the ITU and in the 3GPP radio organization will be around the radio frequency bands used.
“The 5G will work on new spectrum bands. And for that we need to wipe out other services that work in this band, “says Sebastian Cabello, director general for Latin America at GSMA, the organization that manages several key cellular technologies.
And every country already signals what interests them most. China, Japan and South Korea test medium and high frequencies, capable of transmitting high speeds of internet. The US and Europe want the same, but also bet on low frequencies, which cover wider regions without needing many antennas.
“Until then, you’re going to have to separate what’s standard from what’s marketing,” comments Lopes.
It’s in Brazil?
According to government officials, Brazil must follow guidelines dictated by the great poles producers of technology and adhere to the model of some of them.
“I think Brazil may not want to have the pretension to lead in technology,” said André Borges, secretary of telecommunications at the Ministry of Science, Technology, Innovation and Communications (MCTIC).
For him, Brazil must find its space and act in an integrated way globally and follow a worldwide trend. This will represent an economic scale and contribute to a particular vocation, for example, with the special development of agribusiness, which is a special competence of Brazil, explains the secretary.
He says, however, that there are researches in courses in Brazil about 5G. “We have some institutes that use Funtel’s [Fund for the Technological Development of Telecommunications] and are creating. They have already done successful tests with 5G technology, such as the Inatel CCR case,” he adds.
For Anatel, 5G should not be the technology responsible for filling the gaps perceived by consumers in Brazil.
“Many of the things that we need today we have already been able to meet with 3G or 4G.If you are in an uncovered area, instead of 5G, you can do [coverage] with 4G, (using the frequency) 700Mhz,” says Linhares, the broadcasting manager of Anatel.
Other areas with incipient coverage, he says, can be served by satellite networks. “I do not see 5G as the best short-term solution.”
Fifth-generation mobile broadband will be used, he says, “in large urban centers and suburban regions with a high density of people.”
According to Linhares, Brazil expects the 5G to run in the 3.5 Ghz, 26 Ghz and 40 Ghz bands. The agency, however, may have to make some regulatory adjustment as the TV-RO service (from satellite dishes) is broadcast in a range close to 3.5 Ghz.
Proximity may cause interference. The adjustments, however, should be minimal, as the use of TV-RO is falling, thanks to the advance of Digital TV and pay-TV.
By 2018, Anatel plans to regulate new conditions for the use of the 3.5 Ghz band, which can be allocated to 4G and, when the technology is consolidated, to 5G.
