5G is happening, and it's happening this year. Qualcomm's announcement today of a working 5G NR (New Radio) system kicks off two weeks of fast and furious 5G announcements, as infrastructure vendors start to spin up the flywheels that will result in AT&T and Verizon launching early 5G systems later this year.
5G NR is the keystone around which the biggest 5G transformations will happen. It's the "new radio," capable of adapting to a very wide range of airwaves and dramatically lowering latency, which will enable devices like autonomous cars to make very quick decisions.
"We want to yield hundreds of megabits in an application even when a system has multiple users ... and also support very dense use cases where you're going to have 100,000 devices in a city block," Qualcomm CTO Matt Grob said.
One hundred thousand devices, you ask? Think about a dense city block where every thermostat, light bulb, traffic light, and building sensor is connected, and you start to get there.
"You're going to see the industry growing beyond smartphones ... take the automobile as an example. You read about self-driving cars? They're coming. You'll have improved safety systems on the road, with low-latency vehicle-to-vehicle connectivity, and that's not something you saw in 3G and 4G," Grob said.
Low Frequency, High Bandwidth
Qualcomm's contribution today pushes 5G into frequency bands below 6GHz, which is needed if 5G networks are going to span the nation. In a demo, Qualcomm showed how carriers can overlay 4GHz 5G onto existing 2.1GHz 4G cell sites with roughly the same coverage, so they don't have to add more cell sites to introduce the new network. That will be really important for getting 5G up and running quickly.
Here in the US, the 4GHz role will largely be played by a new frequency band becoming available, the 3.5GHz CBRS band. That will take a few years to become available, but all these moving parts are moving together.
In the demo, we saw what a huge difference 5G is going to make, even in extremely difficult situations. In an indoor, VR simulation, 5G NR at 4GHz boosted a user's data rate from 19.49Mbps to 113.94Mbps, largely by using huge numbers of tiny antennas and intelligently directed beams of information.
That easy-to-build, sub-6GHz 5G NR network will be supplemented by millimeter wave, which is the technology Verizon and AT&T are working with in their early 5G launches. Millimeter wave can deliver even faster, multi-gigabit speeds, but it has trouble with wall penetration and distance. That means carriers will likely have to spring for new networks of smaller cells when they do broad mmWave rollouts.
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"Operators don't want to have to go out and deploy a whole bunch of new cell sites. They want to reuse the same cell sites," Qualcomm engineering VP John Smee said.
There are still many steps before we see a broad 5G launch. The full 5G spec, referred to as Release 15, won't be finalized until September 2018, according to the 3GPP, the standards body in charge. The companies making early bets on 5G consumer rollouts, like AT&T and Verizon, are essentially betting that their equipment will be forward compatible, or that they'll be able to course-correct along the way.
"There's going to be a lot going on in the next year," Grob said.