5G networks will offer ‘totally new possibilities’

The Vice-President of the European Commission responsible for the Digital Agenda, Neelie Kroes, has said it is important to understand 5G mobile will be more than just the next step beyond today’s 4G networks.

She said: “It will also offer totally new possibilities to connect people, and also things – being cars, houses, energy infrastructures. All of them at once, wherever you and they are.”

According to the roadmap of the 5G public private partnership, 5G standards will allow wireless capacity 1,000 times higher than in 2010; energy savings of up to 90% per service; service creation time to fall from 90 hours to 90 minutes; and over seven trillion wireless devices for over seven billion people.

The skyrocketing use of mobile and wireless devices is expected to lead to a capacity crunch within the next decade. Deployment of very dense networks is a possible response researched globally. European research is developing a toolbox that facilitates co-ordinated spectrum sharing between ultra-dense networks, with the potential to increase capacity by a factor greater than ten.

€16m of EU funding is invested in the METIS project, co-ordinated by Sweden’s Ericsson, to prepare the architecture of the future 5G networks. METIS will help with pre-standardisation and regulation processes.

Other EU-funded projects on 5G include CROWD, led by Italian company Intecs, which focuses on very dense wireless access networks, and 5GNOW, led by German research organisation the Fraunhofer Society, which works on waveforms. iJOIN, TROPIC, Mobile Cloud Networking and MOTO are also part of the research effort.