5G standard draft released: it’s not just the speed that changes

The Mobile World Congress, the most influential annual exhibition in the global mobile communications industry, opened in Barcelona, ​​Spain on February 27. Against the backdrop of dazzling new products, the blueprint of "Internet of Everything" supported by the fifth-generation mobile communications technology (5G) is becoming increasingly clear.

[[187010]]

It’s not just the speed that’s changing

When it comes to 5G, many people will ask, "What else does it have besides speed?" In fact, the communications industry itself has not yet given a standardized definition of 5G. It is only based on the previous mobile communication technology update cycle of about 10 years that it is believed that 5G will be commercialized around 2021.

This year, the International Telecommunication Union started soliciting 5G plans as planned and released a draft of 13 5G indicators, which is a big step forward in the 5G standardization process. These indicators include: each 5G base station can provide at least 20Gbps downlink and 10Gbps uplink broadband transmission capacity; it must ensure that user data connections on vehicles with a speed of 500 kilometers per hour are not interrupted; the maximum delay of connecting 5G users cannot exceed 4 milliseconds, and even maintain ultra-low latency communication of 1 millisecond; a single 5G network can carry at least 1 million devices per square kilometer.

What do these indicators mean? Imagine a future scenario like this: a surgeon takes a driverless taxi controlled by a 5G network to a train station. On a high-speed train traveling at a speed of 500 kilometers per hour, he downloads a 2G-sized high-definition movie to his mobile phone in 6.4 seconds. On the way, he receives a notice from the hospital that he needs to remotely control a robot thousands of miles away to perform surgery. Through the 5G network, the surgery is done cleanly and beautifully, and the robot does not even have a "blink" of delay... With driverless cars, high-speed trains surfing the Internet, and telemedicine, this doctor has achieved "connecting everything and controlling everything" through the 5G network.

The lucrative emerging market space is called the "blue ocean". Yang Hua, secretary general of the TD Industry Alliance, which was founded by eight Chinese companies including Huawei, ZTE and Datang Telecom, said in an interview with reporters that the "blue ocean industry" in the 5G era will be the vertical industries in the economy, rather than the mobile communications industry itself. The 5G network will become an infrastructure that greatly improves the production efficiency and intelligent manufacturing level of various vertical industries, and also brings a smarter lifestyle to ordinary people.

National interest game

At present, the world's communications industry giants are striving to "take the lead" in 5G technology research and development. Taking Chinese companies as an example, ZTE has invested 200 million yuan in 5G research and development, and has more than 2,000 employees worldwide who are responsible for 5G research. ZTE's top scientist Xiang Jiying told reporters at the World Mobile Communications Conference that ZTE had completed the first stage of testing of 5G prototypes in 2016, and that after the international standards are launched in 2018, ZTE will launch pre-commercial products in the shortest time.

5G network is undoubtedly the key technology to realize the "Internet of Everything". However, in an interview with reporters, Forrester senior analyst Biller pointed out that since 5G standards have not yet been agreed upon, the number of various related devices is still limited, and business plans lack a clear return on investment, the global deployment of 5G networks still faces huge challenges.

Yang Hua emphasized that having a say in standard setting will inevitably drive industrial development. "The future competition for 5G standards will not only depend on technology and market choices, but also on the game of national interests."

Take the competition of 3G standards as an example. The 3G standards advocated by the United States and Europe are actually FDD technologies. However, for the sake of their own industrial interests, the two sides proposed different standards, which competed with TD-SCDMA proposed by China. The ITU once clearly stipulated that June 30, 1998 was the final deadline for countries to submit 3G standards. However, the US government put pressure on the ITU in 2007 to accept the US WIMAX as the fourth standard nearly 10 years after the "deadline".

Nowadays, countries around the world are accelerating their actions in the formulation and deployment of 5G standards. For example, former US President Obama launched the Advanced Wireless Research Program before leaving office at the end of 2016, investing $400 million in the next seven years to allow the United States to "maintain its leading position and win the next generation of mobile communication technology competition"; the European Commission announced in September last year that it would invest 120 million euros for public institutions to purchase advanced mobile communication equipment, and EU member states would complete the full deployment of 5G systems by 2025; the British government also confirmed in November last year that it would invest at least 1 billion pounds by around 2020 to improve the construction of national high-speed optical fiber and 5G network infrastructure.

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) of the United States proposed new and flexible service rules for the frequency band in 2015. FCC Commissioner Rosenworcel once publicly stated: "When we look at the long term, we will find that there are some places where the United States must go alone, and the 28GHz band that was not included in the spectrum study list at the World Radio Conference is one of them. Because this band can be allocated to global mobile applications, the United States cannot stop."

Will the “China Moment” Come?

According to the 5G timetable announced by the ITU, the collection of 5G technical solutions and the formulation of standards will be completed before 2020, and relatively complete technical standard proposals from various countries must be submitted before June 30, 2018.

In the history of mobile communication evolution, Chinese enterprises have gone through the stages of "2G tracking, 3G breakthrough, and 4G synchronization". Yang Hua said that the 4G standard presents a competition pattern between the FDD-LTE standard dominated by Europe and the TD-LTE standard dominated by China. In the future 5G standard competition, these two standards may be unified, or more likely to remain a pattern of two or three standards competing.

Yang Hua emphasized that from a technical perspective alone, many industry insiders believe that the China-led TD-LTE standard represents the mainstream of technological development and adapts to the requirements of asymmetry and reciprocity of mobile Internet.

At present, the three major scenarios for 5G applications include high-traffic mobile broadband services such as 3D/ultra-high-definition video, large-scale Internet of Things services, and services such as unmanned driving and industrial automation that require low-latency and high-reliability connections. In 2016, China's Huawei's polarization code solution was adopted as the coding solution for the control channel in high-traffic mobile broadband services. Although the data channel uses the solution of Qualcomm, and there are two more scenarios in which channel coding solutions will compete, industry insiders believe that the adoption of polarization codes lays the foundation for Huawei's subsequent voice in the 5G era, which is of great significance.

The era of European and American companies monopolizing standards is coming to an end. The international status of Chinese communication technology is rising, and Chinese companies have become a role that cannot be ignored by their international counterparts. Before the opening of the World Mobile Communications Conference, the US "Wall Street Journal" website reported that the world's mobile communications industry is undergoing a transformation, and Asian companies are using the international process of formulating 5G standards to challenge the existing world order and Western advantages.

On the opening day of the World Mobile Communications Conference, Stuart Revell, a researcher at the 5G Research Center of the University of Surrey in the UK, said in an interview with reporters: "We have a close cooperative relationship with China today, especially in scientific research, development, test platforms and standardization. We believe that Chinese counterparts are important partners in our scientific research."

Forrester's Biller said that Chinese companies such as Huawei and ZTE will play a "major role" in the development and deployment of 5G.