Alcatel-Lucent techie: Race for ‘5G’ technologies is 'ridiculous'

Spectrum harmony will be key enabler:

However, to achieve the necessary economics for millimetre wave systems to enter the mainstream, there must be harmonisation, he argues, saying: “To keep cost down, and get adoption rates to be very high, it will be better for the industry to have common frequency bands to use with the same chipset.

"As a US citizen, my concern is that the federal policy is ignoring the opportunity to build the technical talent and to get the investment needed to en-sure that the US plays a role in the massively broadband future. I think millimetre wave could have bandwidth and capability so far beyond what we’ve seen in wireless... But without a spectrum policy that focuses on supporting and encouraging such products, we’ll be left behind.”

The FCC is taking some action and has issued a notice of inquiry on the feasibility of using millimetre wave spectrum below 95GHz for cellular communications, and on potential licensing and spectrum sharing models. The US was the first major country to open up some of the millimetre wave bands for licence-exempt use, though initial applications have been focused on high capacity point-to-point links for enterprise or backhaul use.

The WiGig standard also targets a millimetre wave band, 60GHz, effectively running Wi-Fi in that spectrum to support very high speed, short range links for applications such as small cell HetNets, small cell backhaul and video transfer between home devices.

Government-backed efforts in many other countries are also focused on this topic, however. One interesting example is MiWaveS, (millimetre wave small cell access and backhauling), a European Union-supported consortium of 15 players looking to develop millimetre wave radio technologies for future 5G platforms. The three-year project falls under the auspices of the European Commission's Seventh Framework Program and is focused on how “the flexible spectrum usage of the mmW frequency bands at 60GHz and 71-86GHz will enable data transmissions up to 10Gbps for backhaul and 5Gbps for mobile access”.

As project manager Laurent Dussopt said, other objectives include developments in “system architecture, networking functions and algorithms, radio and antenna technologies”.

The consortium includes two operators, Telecom Italia and Orange plus vendors including Intel, Nokia and STMicro; technology transfer specialists like CEA-Leti; and several academic institutions such as the University of Rennes in France, the Technical University of Dresden in Germany, and the University of Surrey in the UK, where that country’s 5G R&D efforts are situated in a newly created centre funded by vendors such as Huawei.

For all this clever and necessary R&D effort, however, 5G will work best in the end if it is not a dramatic step change, but an evolution of current trends – in virtualisation and SDN even more than in RAN hardware. The economics of the mobile operators, and even the wireless-focused OTT players, will not stand for another massive round of hardware upgrades so soon after 4G, and the returns to be gained from such changes are diminishing.

The next move must be to software-enable as much as possible and focus hard technology innovation on the critical remaining components at the cell site. And that does not require an artificial 4G/5G border to get started in earnest.

Copyright © 2014, Wireless Watch

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