Playing the 5G “can do” versus “will do” game could be enlightening right now. We’re starting to see more about the reality of 5G emergence, and that might help us in the game. The game is important because it will define just how many visible changes we can expect from 5G deployment, and when we can expect them. It’s also important because it may show us what 5G players really have a shot at an upside.
I’ve seen a lot of articles recently on what “5G can do” or “could do”, and the choice of phrases is right on, even though most readers will likely misinterpret the meaning. “Can do” versus “will do” separates capability from reality. There are a lot of things technology “can do”, but many (most, these days) are things that the technology could support, of those things had their own business drivers. The “will do” category consists of the things that actually have those drivers, either because the new technology itself can provide them, or because the technology solves a pent-up problem that’s holding something back.
Let’s start with the stuff that we can say with fair confidence will be provided through 5G. All of it relates to the radio access network (RAN), which in 5G is known as “New Radio” or NR. There is no question that we’ll see 5G NR deploy, simply because it’s an improvement in both per-user speed and total capacity per cell site. There are a lot of subtexts on the 5G NR story, though.
Subtext one is the “mobile-versus-millimeter-wave” story. The flavor of 5G most people think about is the one targeted to mobile devices, but in some geographies (like the US) it’s likely that another target will dominate early on. Millimeter wave 5G, so called because of the very short wavelength of the radio frequencies used, is more directional than standard 5G and also has issues passing through a lot of dense objects. These characteristics make it less than ideal for mobile users, but for creating hybrid “wireline” delivery via a hybrid with fiber-to-the-node (FTTN), it’s great. Where demand density is low, meaning rural or sparse suburban areas, it might be the only way telcos could get high-speed broadband to homes.
The 5G/FTTH hybrid situation is one reason why the “can/will” confusion with 5G is so high. It’s almost certain that this mode of 5G will deploy, starting late this year. Many of the articles on 5G trials are referring to it, but the truth is that this model doesn’t have anything in common with what most call “5G”. Using it wouldn’t ensure that any other 5G features or deployments were pulled through. Think of the hybrid approach as a totally different technology, kind of like “home broadband over radar”.
Mobile 5G, meaning NR, is the radio side of what we all think of as 5G, just as sticking an LTE radio on top of a tree doesn’t build a mobile network, so 5G NR needs something to surround it. The low-apple on that front is something called “5G Non-Stand-Alone”, or NSA. What the NSA means is that 5G NR rides on the mobile infrastructure of 4G. This is the minimum requirement for an evolution to what appears to users to be a 5G service, and this is something we can expect to see going live in noticeable quantities in 2019.
The big barrier to NSA isn’t the radios or the NSA hybrid process, but the handsets. We don’t have much in the way of 5G phones at this point, and that puts operators and users in the classic state of interdependence, sometimes called the “first telephone problem”. You can’t sell the first telephone because that first buyer would have nobody to call. You can’t put up NSA without handsets to use it, but nobody would buy handsets for NSA without service. Somebody has to step up, and it takes time for this kind of tentative watch-the-other-person thing to evolve into some real movement and momentum. Early 5G phones will obviously have to work on 4G too, but they’ll be a bit more expensive. Most expect the high-end smartphones (whose users are most likely to want to exercise 5G bragging rights) to move first, and it will probably take several years for budget phones to get 5G.
These are typical ecosystem growing pain problems that will be resolved, but they will be resolved. You can bet you’ll be able to buy 5G phones and get 5G services, within a couple years if you live in a high-value market area. Does that mean that all the “could/can” stories then morph do “will/does” stories? Nope.
We hear about lots of wonderful things that could be done with 5G speeds, but the first caveat we have on our rosy NSA future is that we don’t know what actual service speeds will be offered. 5G specs say the user could experience 1G connections, but we’re back to that “could” qualifier. There are two problems with superspeed 5G in the real world. The first is that most applications wouldn’t need anything like that speed; we can deliver HD video in many areas on 4G, and certainly smartphones with WiFi connectivity can experience it. The second problem is that if somebody were to actually utilize 5G at gigabit rates, they could put a serious strain on the backhaul infrastructure. Would an operator build out the additional resources without charging more? Would people pay what was then charged? You get the picture.
Deeper into 5G than the NR specs, I think even the “could do” label may be misleading, at least for the next three to five years. The 5G Core specifications add in a lot of stuff, including network slicing and NFV, that are technologies in search of a business model. Could we do network slicing? Sure, but the question is why operators would deploy it unless they can see some profit from it. Same with NFV, but perhaps more so. Anyone who’s been involved in NFV over the years knows that the majority of the specs are aimed at customer-specific appliance virtualization. Wireless networks don’t do customer-specific infrastructure deployment. What 5G needs isn’t NFV, it’s just cloud-hosted features, which we don’t need all that stuff to deploy.
You’re going to get 5G, but almost surely not all of it. You’re going to get faster connections, but not as fast as you might have hoped. Don’t worry, you probably won’t know the difference.
5G-specific applications like IoT or augmented reality are the most problematic of all. I read recently that someone thought every autonomous vehicle would need gigabit connectivity. Yeah, right. I do think that there’s a future in augmented reality, but I don’t think the problem is the network, latency, or speed, it’s providing the intelligence needed for the augmentation. That’s one of those business-case issues, the ecosystem that surrounds information delivery still has to come up with the information.
We should think about mobile futures for sure, but we should be more realistic about the totality of the changes that would be needed to bring a new generation along. It’s more than what the user wants, it’s most of all what the players deploying the stuff can profit from. With everyone expecting unlimited service at faster and faster speeds, and even lower prices, we seem to be disconnecting from that profit side, and that won’t have a good outcome.