Should 5G excite us? And where's the spectrum?

The news that Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd has successfully tested a so-called fifth-generation (5G) wireless technology, which will allow users to download an entire movie in just one second, should excite consumers. After all, who does not want to surf the Internet or download videos faster?

add_main_imageHowever, in a country such as India that is yet to get its third-generation or 3G technology act right, let alone the fourth-generation or 4G technology, scepticism is in order—especially when the government is yet to satisfactorily resolve the spectrum issue in the country.

The telecom world has seen a new mobile generation roughly every 10 years since the first 1G system was introduced in 1981. The first 2G system started to roll out in 1992 while the first 3G system first appeared in 2001. NextMAds

The 3G network is several times faster than the 2G one. Almost all telcos claim that they can provide speeds up to 21.1 Mbps on their 3G networks but real download speeds invariably fall when shared among users. Besides, most telcos have a “fair usage” policy wherein speed drop after reaching a specified download limit. 4G, at least technically, should have data speeds capable of reaching 100 megabits per second while on the move, and 1GB per second when stationary.

In India, we have the time division-long term evolution or TD-LTE standard, similar to China’s 4G standard that was amended and published by China’s largest telecom operator, China Mobile. TD-LTE is the technology being adopted by Reliance Industries Ltd’s (RIL’s) telecom venture, Reliance Jio Infocomm Ltd, which is likely to launch by the year-end. TD, unlike FD or fixed division, implies that the “receive” and “transmit” channels divide the time between them on the same frequency band. New mobile generations are typically assigned new frequency bands and wider spectral bandwidth per frequency channel (1G up to 30kHz, 2G up to 200kHz, 3G up to 5MHz, and 4G up to 40MHz), but skeptics say there is little room for new frequency bands or larger channel bandwidths. In India, TD-LTE has been given the 2.3–2.4GHz band.

So where does 5G fit in this ecosystem?

To begin with, the term 5G is more a marketing term for advanced LTE or 4G, which also can theoretically offer speeds of up to 1GB. Besides, advanced LTE has been standardized by the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) as a major enhancement of the LTE standard. LTE itself is being marketed as 4G, which mobile technology purists would dismiss as a 3.9G technology. Second, the 5G service will be available only in 2020. It’s anyone’s guess that by then, speedier technologies would have surfaced in labs.

Third, 5G will need standards. In the UK, for instance, the communications regulator Ofcom is readying itself for the launch of 5G by holding discussions on how to free radio frequencies for 5G. To allay fears of a future capacity crunch in the airwaves as rapidly growing usage of mobile broadband devices, such as smartphones and tablet computers, increases pressure on networks.

According to Cisco Inc.’s ‘Global Mobile Data Traffic Forecast for 2012-2017’, 2G supported 76% of global mobile devices/M2M (machine-to-machine) connections in 2012; 3G supported 23%, and 4G supported 1%. By 2017, 2G networks will support 33% of global mobile devices/M2M connections; 3G networks will support 57% while 4G networks will support 10%. sixthMAds

Global mobile data traffic, forecast the report, will increase 13-fold over the next four years, reaching 11.2 exabytes per month by 2017. An exabyte is a unit of information or computer storage equal to one quintillion bytes. The expected steady increase in mobile traffic is partly due to continued strong growth in the number of mobile Internet connections (personal devices and machine-to-machine applications), which will exceed the world’s population (United Nations estimates 7.6 billion) by 2017, the report said.

Broadband subscription in India reached 15 million in February, according to the latest data from telecom regulator Trai. According to Sam Pitroda, adviser to Prime Minister of India, a properly designed broadband rollout in the country can add 1-2% to the country’s GDP. The Indian government is also planning to provide high-speed Internet broadband connectivity to all villages under its National Optical Fibre Network (NOFN) scheme in the next two years.

Given these developments, high-speed networks, regardless of the names they go by, are a must. But the government first needs to allocate spectrum properly while telcos and technology companies need to go beyond naming hype cycles.