5G breakthrough? 5G baloney more like

Here we go again. News of another wireless ‘breakthrough’ has become mainstream news and sent press and commentators into a flurry of speculation as to whether or not it spells doom for the NBN.

The news is that Samsung has tested mobile wireless technology that it calls ‘5G’ that operates in the 28GHz band and supposedly could deliver multigigabit per second speeds. It merited a story in the news section of the Sydney Morning Herald that took up most of the page. And judging from the number of news outlets around the world that reported the story, it was big news.

However, I suspect that whatever Samsung announced has suffered from Chinese Whispers. I’ve tried very hard to find the original Samsung announcement in English, but I don’t think it exists.

I could put into Google as many keywords as I liked from English versions of the story purporting to be quoting from the original and all I got were hundreds of English reports from English language news site. I did track down the original Korean announcement (and you have no idea how difficult it is to reach www.samsung.com instead of www.samsung.com/au) and got Google to translate it for me, but I wouldn’t trust Google Translate an inch with something as technical as this. For the benefit of any Korean-speaking readers the original is here. 

So it seems that most of the reports are relying on secondhand knowledge of what Samsung actually said. Unfortunately I must do the same.

Of those hundreds of reports the ones I looked at were very much focussed on the ‘breakthrough’ aspect of the story. What I believe to be a far more realistic assessment of the announcement was published in Total Telecom. It quoted Bengt Nordstrom, CEO of Swedish consultancy Northstream, branding the announcement a PR stunt, saying that the development was simply "part of a normal R&D effort,” and "I would speculate that NSN (Nokia Siemens Networks), Huawei or Ericsson could have made a similar announcement.”

Well, as a PR stunt it was certainly hugely successful, reinforcing the image of Samsung as being at the cutting edge of mobile technology - and stunt that its arch rival in the smartphone stakes, Apple, has any chance of topping, because it’s not in the wireless technology game.

If the world’s press wants to get excited about 5G wireless technologies it should have reported this news with the same enthusiasm that it trumpeted Samsung’s ‘breakthrough’.

“European Commission Vice President Neelie Kroes announces €50 million for research to deliver 5G mobile technology by 2020, with the aim to put Europe back in the lead of the global mobile industry. ‘I want 5G be pioneered by European industry, based on European research and creating jobs in Europe – and we will put our money where our mouth is,’ Kroes said.”

That was an EU press release on 26 February. It went on to talk about the METIS project, launched the previous November “The METIS overall technical goal is to provide a system concept that supports: 1000 times higher mobile data volume per area: 10 times to 100 times higher number of connected devices; 10 times to 100 times higher typical user data rate; 10 times longer battery life for low power machine-to-machine-communications; 5 times reduced end-to-end latency.”

METIS’s list of 29 members reads like a who’s-who of network equipment vendors, plus telcos. Ericsson, Alcatel-Lucent, Huawei, Nokia Siemens, NTT DoCoMo are all members. Samsung is not. Ericsson claims to have initiated and to be leading METIS and outlined the goals in a presentation atMobile World Congress. 

The presentation was headed “5G for the networked society and beyond”, which makes this comment, from then Ericsson CTO Hakan Eriksson (now CEO of Ericsson Australia) rather curious. Asked by an interviewer inMarch 2011 “What is the future of wireless technology? What comes after LTE and LTE Advanced?” Eriksson was quoted saying: “I don’t see a 5G technology coming because we have already reached the ‘channel limit’ of what you can do.”

I’m almost certain he was misquoted and that what he referred to was the Shannon Limit. At around the same time Tod Sizer from Bell Labs was saying much the same thing to a forum in Sydney.

And it’s not that Eriksson has been proved wrong about 5G in just two years, it’s just that the nomenclature has changed. Remember we haven’t really got 4G yet, calling today’s LTE technology 4G is a misnomer.

Eriksson preceded that remark with a comment that really goes to the heart of the wireless v fibre debate and it’s an aspect that largely gets ignored. The future of wireless, Eriksson said, “will be a question of finding the shortest way to some antenna and from the antenna to optic fibre to the cloud.”

That’s because the laws of physics won’t let a single wireless antenna - or even, as Samsung seems to have demonstrated, multiple co-located antennas - serve huge numbers of customers all demanding huge amounts of data. Yes the limit will be pushed but not far enough to meet anticipated demand.

Sure, there are technologies like the one Samsung appears to have developed that increase performance but in the end it’s not a question of wireless v fibre. As Eriksson says, it’s getting that fibre close enough to users so that wireless can meet the bandwidth and volume demand.

It then becomes a question of who owns the technology, who owns the spectrum and who’s making the money from the service. As more and more base stations are needed to meet mobile broadband demand it is more than likely that NBN fibre, if it gets laid will be tapped for backhaul.

Most broadband access today is wireless. If its not over a mobile network it’s via WiFi in our homes and offices but we as individuals make the investment in the technology, we don’t pay for spectrum, because WiFi spectrum is free and we don’t have to fund a huge industry that, in addition to running a technically sophisticated network, devotes huge resources to advertising, marketing, billing and serving its customers.

The question is: in the future just how much of the broadband revenue ‘pie’ will go to organisations providing wireless access, how much to those owning the fibre, or providing access to the fibre and how much to the organisations providing the services carried?