The Race to 5G

UK will start to experience the benefits of 5G but its full deployment will take time, experts have claimed.

21:52 05 June 2018

So much has been said about 5G and its pending deployment. This excitement is further heightened by ‘the race to 5G’, which has got a lot of people in the mobile industry excited. The next generation mobile technology is expected to deliver ultrafast download speeds and will minimise latency.

 

The general consensus was that the first commercial 5G services would go live in 2020. However, with numerous companies trying to stay ahead of the competition, there have been claims that the technology would be deployed as early as 2019 and even this year. However, it is more likely that the full potential of 5G and the truly transformational applications that it will enable won’t arrive until the mid 2020s, at the earliest.

 

The first 5G networks will be linked to 4G core infrastructure and will use new radio technologies (5G NR). According to Huawei, 3GPP’s ‘Release 15’, which will enable superior mobile networks will arrive before 2018 ends while ‘Release 16’ will deliver the full capabilities of 5G and enable standalone applications. This means that mobile operators will need to change how their networks were built before they can deploy the ‘true 5G’ technology.