The Week In 5G: 9/18/2018 – Ericsson Says US Leads 5G Race, Verizon Rolls Out First 5G Home Internet, German Firms Want Speedier 5G Deployment
By Jof Enriquez,
Follow me on Twitter @jofenriq
Swedish telecom equipment maker Ericsson believes that the United States is leading the world in the race to 5G deployment because the major U.S. carriers can support multiple use cases using the millimeter wave band spectrum.
"I think in general, you could say that the United States is ahead of the pack," Ericsson VP and head of 5G Commercialization Thomas Noren told ZDNet at Mobile World Congress Americas (MWCA) in Los Angeles. "Of course, it would have been great to have that [mid-band spectrum], but I think it's pretty clear that millimeter-wave is happening in the US."
Nokia's North America CTO Mike Murphy begged to differ, telling ZDNet that the millimeter-rich U.S. faces regulatory and logistical delays in setting up small cells. By contrast, China, Korea, and Japan all plan to utilize mid-band spectrum for faster deployment nationwide.
"You can deliver something more truly on what we're expecting for a 5G service, and the beauty of the mid-band is – especially with massive MIMO – you can probably reuse most of your existing sites, which means, practically speaking, you can deploy faster and at a lower cost," said Murphy.
Regardless, the U.S. carriers are going full steam ahead with their 5G rollouts. Verizon announced that it will begin offering the first commercial 5G home internet service to customers in Houston, Indianapolis, Los Angeles, and Sacramento, Calif. on Oct. 1, 2018. Customers elsewhere can start signing up for the service this Thursday, though the service will go live initially in those four cities.
Subscribers "should expect typical network speeds around 300 Mbps and, depending on location, peak speeds of nearly 1 Gbps, with no data caps," said the carrier, which is using small cells instead of wired broadband. "Verizon 5G Home is ideal for consumers looking to ‘cut the cord’ or upgrade from their current cable service."
Verizon 5G Home likely will piggyback off its current 4G or LTE network. According to Fortune, while Verizon’s 5G Home service won’t be a true 5G wireless network, it will help the company as it continues to build out a faster wireless network.
U.S. customers won't enjoy blazing-fast and reliable mobile 5G services until next year. Moreover, because the carriers will be using different frequencies, and standards are yet to be finalized, subscribers probably will use carrier-locked 5G devices, at least initially, according to BGR.
"It’s not because there isn’t a desire and we don’t want to have cross-compatibility, said AT&T VP of radio networks and device design Gordon Mansfield. "It’s just that nobody has figured out how to cram the 28 GHz 5G that Verizon and T-Mobile are using, and AT&T’s 39GHz 5G, into one box yet. And, while T-Mobile and Verizon are using similar 28 GHz bands, T-Mobile is also putting 5G on the 600 MHz band, which Verizon is not."
While spectrum has opened up in the U.S., the same cannot be said in Germany, whose Federal Network Agency, Bundesnetzagentur (BNetzA), unveiled this week its auction roadmap — which fell short of expectations from politicians and the business community. BNetzA President Jochen Homann said the proposed auction terms required data speeds to double, but warned that the frequencies on offer were not suitable for countrywide coverage.
“A nationwide buildout with 5G technology would be excessively costly,” Homann stated, adding that longer-range frequencies would be auctioned in years to come, reported Reuters.
BNetzA has scheduled the first auction sometime during the first quarter of 2019. Another auction for the 2 Ghz and 3.6 Ghz frequencies for digital industrial supply chains is slated in the early 2020s.
Meanwhile, French telecoms regulator Arcep said a tender to award mobile frequencies for the provision of 5G services could take place by mid-2019, reported RCR Wireless.
German corporations this week called on the government to speed up 5G deployment nationwide. In statements to Handelsblatt, senior executives from BMW, VW, Deutsche Bank, Deutsche Bahn, and Continental, among others, criticized Germany’s infrastructure plans, saying a lack of ambition and coordination could endanger Germany’s international competitiveness.
"Cars are increasingly becoming networked devices. But that cannot work without a fast, comprehensive 5G network," said Herbert Diess, CEO of Volkswagen, which, along with the car industry, is banking on autonomous vehicles to become one of most important 5G use cases.
Industrial and manufacturing automation is another key use case for 5G, one that the UK government is trying to develop. It has awarded £4.8 million to fund 5G trials of the Worcestershire 5G Consortium. A member of the consortium, Japanese machine tool builder Yamazaki Mazak, will use the faster connection speeds brought by 5G to fully realize already-advanced industry 4.0 solutions to become more efficient when manufacturing products at its Worcester factory.
“Manufacturers across the UK and beyond are now reaping the productivity rewards of greater connectivity among their industrial equipment. Industry 4.0 centers on the key design principals of interoperability of machines and devices, greater data transparency, technical assistance and decentralized decision making. We are starting to see these factors become more commonplace among UK manufacturers, but current internet speeds can only take us so far,” said Marcus Burton, of Yamazaki Mazak, reported 5G.co.uk. “The 5G Testbed represents a hugely exciting opportunity to drive further productivity growth, and [to] facilitate even faster data transfer and analysis for manufacturers.”
Meanwhile, the Indian government is going ahead with plans to showcase India-specific 5G use cases by early 2019.
"We have written to Cisco, Samsung, Ericsson, and Nokia, and telecom service providers to partner with us to start 5G technology-based trials, and have got positive response from them," telecom secretary Aruna Sundararajan told ETTelecom.
She added that Huawei has been excluded from India’s trials to explore 5G use cases. The U.S. and Australia had earlier placed bans on Huawei for alleged security concerns.
“We are in regular touch with DoT and concerned government officials. The Indian government has always supported Huawei and has been appreciative of our path-breaking technologies and solutions," responded a statement from Huawei.
Besides communications, different 5G use cases will need customized automation solutions to handle complexities. According to Stawan Kadepurkar, Business Head & EVP, Hi-Tech, L&T Technology Services, writing for the publication Light Reading: "Automation solutions for 5G should deliver successful 5G events in simulation as well as live environment; high demanding use cases, e.g. VR experience or even hologram experience; and Interoperability with other networks including legacy networks, e.g. LTE fall-back."