The next technology that will change the world, 5G, is ready

Throughout history, every social transformation, socio-economic development, and productivity improvement has been accompanied by technological breakthroughs. Entering the 21st century, communications, the Internet, etc. have become increasingly important productive forces, and have completely changed people's lives. Looking back, it has not been long since the arrival of 4G, and now the 5G era is coming in the blink of an eye. It is no exaggeration to say that 5G will be the next technology to change the world. Consulting firm IHS Markit believes that 5G will be a catalyst for pushing mobile technology into the exclusive field of general technology.

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Many people may think that the transition from 4G to 5G means faster Internet access, better signal and clearer voice when making calls. If you think so, you are totally wrong. 5G technology will break through the boundaries of communication, jump out of mobile Internet to connect everything, become a more powerful unified platform, connect new industries and more terminals, and give birth to new services, which can enable mankind to move towards an unprecedented world such as artificial intelligence.

When discussing what use cases and applications 5G will bring, it is generally believed that this includes ultra-high-fidelity media, safer autonomous driving, more immersive entertainment activities, augmented reality and virtual reality video viewing through mobile phones, and the improvement of security brought by high reliability, helping us to provide sustainable infrastructure development, and remote medical care through stable access, etc. In fact, 5G and the opportunities brought by 5G have far exceeded the existing communication industry ecosystem. 5G will be able to improve many industries and their connectivity, including more efficient energy, water and electricity utilization, or more digital factories. In addition, 5G will also bring huge and positive economic benefits, including services and trade. With the efforts of the entire industry, I believe that there will be more applications that we can't imagine now, just like the 4G+ era gave birth to various "shared XX" that are now so popular.

In summary, the three most important application scenarios in the 5G era include:

First, enhanced application broadband. For example, high-definition remote online or virtual reality, which are often mentioned, are characterized by high speed and low latency.

Second, mission-critical services. This includes critical tasks that are more closely related to artificial intelligence, such as industrial robots, service robots, and unmanned driving, which reflect the needs of ultra-low latency, high reliability, and strong security.

Third, the massive Internet of Things. For example, many applications of smart homes, smart wearables, and smart cities that we often mention are reflected in this field.

As a leader in 5G technology, Qualcomm has said that 5G will be commercialized in 2019. At the 3GPP plenary meeting that ended earlier, the proposal to accelerate the 5G standardization process was officially passed, which means that 5G can be commercialized in 2019, which also means that the 5G era is really "just around the corner". Not long ago, on August 9, China Telecom also officially announced the start of construction of the 5G innovation demonstration network in Xiongan New Area. Qualcomm also demonstrated the prototype of 5G NR (new air interface) below 6GHz on site, as well as the application of 5G technology in multiple scenarios such as smart cities and smart cars.

When 5G arrives, this technological breakthrough will not only break the boundaries of communications, but will also push mobile technology into the exclusive field of general technology. The impact it brings may be no less than the changes brought about by the Age of Discovery when the world was connected.

According to forecasts, the full economic benefits of 5G will be realized worldwide by 2035, when 5G-enabled industries (from retail to education, transportation to entertainment and everything else) could generate economic output worth up to $12.3 trillion. This figure is almost equivalent to the total spending of all American consumers in 2016, and it even exceeds the total consumer spending of China, Japan, France, Germany and the United Kingdom last year.

In the 5G value chain, there is a potential output of up to $3.5 trillion and the creation of up to 22 million jobs. Intuitively, this number exceeds the total population of Beijing. Over time, 5G's overall contribution to global GDP growth is expected to be equivalent to a country of the same size as India, which is currently the world's seventh largest economy.

Looking back at China, by 2035, our 5G value chain will create a total output of 984 billion and 9.5 million new jobs.

In short, mobile technology is evolving from a primarily personal technology to a platform that can support new cutting-edge applications, promote business innovation, and stimulate economic growth. The rise of 5G is a tipping point in this process.

Laying the foundation for key elements of 5G NR evolution

5G New Radio (5G NR) is a new wireless air interface global 5G standard currently being developed, designed to support a wide range of 5G terminal types, services, deployments and spectrum. 5G refers to the fifth generation of mobile communications, and NR is the abbreviation of the 5G air interface technology currently determined by 3GPP, the authoritative organization for setting global mobile communication standards. It stands for new radio, which means new radio or new wireless communication technology. The air interface can be simply understood as the "invisible" "interface" between mobile phones and base stations. For mobile communications, the air interface is one of the most basic, important and difficult technologies. Currently, the 5G new air interface is a work project of 3GPP. It will define a new generation of OFDM-based wireless communication standards, which will become the basis for the next generation of mobile networks.

To drive the development of wireless technology to 5G and its continued evolution in the 5G era, we generally need three basic elements.

One is OFDM, or orthogonal frequency division multiplexing technology. In the field of LTE and Wi-Fi technology, OFDM has been widely used from the perspective of standards, chips and commercial use. Qualcomm began investing in 5G research and development many years ago, and after years of deep cultivation, OFDM is still the most suitable 5G air interface access technology in the evolution from 4G to 5G. The advantage of OFDM is that, on the one hand, it can meet our needs well from the perspective of applications, services and experience. On the other hand, in the 4G era, Qualcomm and many companies in the industry already have the ability to apply OFDM well at the technical and chip levels. So when it extends to 5G, we will have a very good foundation to apply this technology and carry out a large number of services.

The second is a universal and flexible framework, which is more reflected in the frame structure to the media access layer (MAC layer). There is a very important concept here: forward compatibility. In the early stages of the 5G standard or the early deployment of 5G by operators, it is likely that they will choose to start from one point, such as enhanced mobile broadband, that is, focus on improving network speed. Forward compatibility requires us to leave enough framework flexibility in the air interface, physical layer and media access layer when carrying out the standardization and early deployment of enhanced mobile broadband, so that when we introduce critical business and massive Internet of Things in the future, we have considerable flexibility to achieve forward compatibility, so that the introduction of new services will have no effect on the previously deployed enhanced mobile broadband. Therefore, we need to maintain maximum flexibility from the perspective of chip design and deployment.

The third is advanced wireless technology, which also includes several aspects. The first is massive MIMO technology. Currently, what we most often see in LTE deployment is the deployment of 4 to 8 antennas on the base station side, and there may be 1-2 antennas on the mobile phone side. But for 5G, we believe that 64 to 256 antennas will be a very common mode. The second is robust millimeter wave technology. How to maximize the link in a non-line-of-sight environment and ensure coverage and robust connectivity is a major challenge facing millimeter waves. The third is the design of flexible and independent TDD. Today's TDD frame structure, such as the frame structure deployed by China Mobile on 2.6GHz, is that each independent subframe can only do uplink or downlink. And we are committed to enhancing the flexibility of the frame structure, realizing self-contained subframes, and putting uplink and downlink channels in the same subframe. Self-contained subframes have two advantages - low latency and very flexible uplink and downlink switching. In terms of latency, after an uplink signal is sent, the downlink reply signal in the same subframe has already returned, which greatly reduces the roundtrip time of information. For uplink and downlink switching, for example, if such self-covered subframes are deployed on TDD, when the downlink traffic is huge, all subframes can be switched to downlink channels, and when the uplink traffic is large, all can be switched to uplink. If there is a network with many users and the traffic is constantly changing from uplink to downlink, then the self-covered subframe mode is the most efficient and is the best mode to support uplink and downlink switching.

5G new air interface will also realize unified design across spectrum types and frequency bands, supporting TDD and FDD bands, as well as low-frequency and high-frequency bands. The unified 5G new air interface framework will meet the needs of different business environments, different operators, different spectrum ownership models and different regions.

Compared with the three standards in the 3G era and the two models in the 4G era, the industry is aware that a single 5G standard will have a crucial impact on the future development of the 5G industry. The realization of a single standard requires looking beyond the terminal level and forming an end-to-end solution capability. As a wireless technology company that brought 3G and 4G connections to the world, Qualcomm maintains close communication with operators and equipment manufacturers to not only meet the needs of equipment manufacturers, but also define new user scenarios, so that it can develop leading and integrated solutions.

For example, at the Qualcomm 5G Summit in February this year, Qualcomm announced plans to cooperate with ZTE and China Mobile to conduct interoperability testing and OTA field trials based on the 5G New Radio (5G NR) specifications. 3GPP is currently developing 5G New Radio specifications. The trial will be based on the 3.5GHz band in the mid-frequency band. The trial aims to promote the large-scale rapid verification and commercialization of 5G New Radio technology in the wireless ecosystem, so that 5G New Radio infrastructure and terminals that comply with the 3GPP Rel-15 standard can be ready to support the timely deployment of commercial networks.

From the perspective of global layout, different countries support different frequency bands for 5G deployment, including both bands below 6GHz and bands above 6GHz. The 5G new air interface must span different frequency bands, including high, medium and low frequency bands, and support both licensed and unlicensed spectrum. Qualcomm has an advanced 5G prototype system that fully complies with the global new air interface standards. Based on this, Qualcomm is also conducting 5G new air interface tests with many infrastructure manufacturers, including AT&T, NTT DOCOMO, Vodafone, Telstra, SK Telecom, etc. Qualcomm has also expressed its hope to launch better products in 2019 and 2020. This also means that the company will conduct a large number of trials in 2018 and 2019 to provide the industry with very feasible solutions before 5G is commercialized on a large scale.

The Evolution of 4G Leads Us to 5G

As mentioned above, the entire industry is looking forward to a unified 5G standard. It is undeniable that the formulation of communication technology standards has always been a battleground for companies with strong R&D capabilities in the industry. In addition to Qualcomm, many communication technology companies have begun to develop 5G, hoping to have their own say in 5G communication technology.

On this road to accelerate the 5G era, Qualcomm has put forward the slogan of "carrying on the past and forging ahead into the future, actions speak louder than words", and officially announced the Snapdragon X50 5G modem during the Qualcomm 4G/5G Summit last year. This is the industry's first 5G modem. Although its release time is much earlier than the commercial use of terminals or even the freezing of standards, its significance lies in helping mobile phone manufacturers to enter the design of 5G mobile phones early, and also helping operators to carry out 5G trials and deployments.

As another player in the industry, Intel launched its own Gigabit LTE modem during the MWC exhibition nearly half a year later. At this time, Qualcomm has already announced the second-generation Gigabit LTE demodulator Snapdragon X20. It should be noted that 5G and 4G are completely different technologies, and how to ensure the smooth migration of 4G and 5G in the early stages of 5G development depends on the strength of Gigabit LTE. Therefore, Intel, which did not seize the opportunity in the 4G era, can be said to be actually 2 to 3 generations behind Qualcomm in 5G products.

In fact, it can be said that the development of 5G is parallel to the continuous evolution of 4G. As 4G technology continues to move forward, we can see that the application scope of smartphones that we originally envisioned is no longer what it was at the beginning. Now 4G technology has been applied to drones, self-driving cars, networked cameras, etc. In addition, we have a large number of LTE IoT applications, such as smart locks in shared bicycles, and the Gigabit LTE mentioned above, which are important innovations and references for the realization of 5G. In other words, the development of 5G does not come out of thin air. 5G must be built on the basis of mature 4G development. In other words, when industry leaders including Qualcomm prepared 4G technology, we were actually ready for 5G.