35 TECHFEED 5G
high-quality video, in industrial and medical situations. It will facilitate large-scale autonomous vehicles such as self- driving cars and drones. In short, it will collapse distances between people and the world around us, enabling innovations that will change society in much the same way that voice- and text-based communication has up to now,” Plunkett says. NEWWORLDS OF POSSIBILITIES “5G will open up a new world of possibilities,” enthuses Kjetil Horneland, CEO at Norwegian video solutions provider Sixty. “Imagine being close to a match in a sports event, no matter where you are, with almost no delay from the live experience, to it being available on your mobile device in a stadium or at home. Imagine richer content at your fingertips, where you actually influence the TV broadcast, more than just watching a static TV broadcast. At any time you could jump into a VR experience of it all. Imagine gaming, TV, social and data services all merging in one delivery, but in a form where you find it simple to use and that the experience is personalised to your preferences. Imagine being connected no matter where you go. This means getting more and richer digital services wherever you are, in the street, at an event or at home; the world will be seamlessly connected.” Horneland continues: “In the past decade we’ve seen an enormous shift in the industry when it comes to mobile networks, Internet access and the availability of streaming media services. Still, this is only the beginning. By 2021 the industry prediction is that around 85% of the world’s Internet traic will be video. With more and more connected devices available, the network side needs to keep up to distribute these services eectively. The Internet was not really built to distribute these loads of data, and we are gradually seeing a shift of better network technology to serve our distribution and future of IoT.
performance and capacity over 4G LTE networks, through a combination of more eicient radio transmission, access to greatly more radio spectrum and changes to the core networks that connect radio base stations. This translates into much more bandwidth for mobile devices, less transmission delay (latency) to better serve real-time video and augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR), along with more certainty and performance guarantees for dierent categories of user and applications. In short, it’s faster and better than the best on oer today and it will change how we work and play.” Yet 5G is more than a new generation of technologies; it promises a new era in which connectivity will become increasingly fluid and flexible. According to Michele Zarri, technical director at GSMA: “5G will be a catalyst for innovation and enable richer, smarter and more convenient living and working”. GSMA Intelligence expects 5G to cover 74% of the EU population by 2025 with over 170 million connections. The combination of high bandwidth and low latency will allow real-time, interactive communication at a new level, believes Plunkett. He says 5G will allow people to fully experience locations and events without physically being there (using AR, VR, mixed reality and 360 video). “It will allow the remote operation of equipment, using
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