5G to be ‘crowded playground,’ conference hears

GATINEAU, Que. — New entrants and existing service providers that haven’t traditionally delved into the mobile wireless market could find opportunities to take advantage of 5G and available spectrum, participants of the Wireless World Research Forum’s 5G Huddle were told Wednesday. Johanne Lemay, co-president of telecommunications consulting company Lemay-Yates Associates Inc., said during a panel discussion on the first day of the two-day international conference held in Gatineau, Que., that she believed the wireless landscape would change in a 5G universe, noting that she’s beginning to think 5G could be a “crowded playground for operators” and that there’s “a potential for 5G to increase the number of players in the mobile market.” Lemay pointed to a recently concluded auction in Ireland, where of the five companies that were awarded spectrum in the 3.6 GHz band, three were traditional mobile carriers, but “you also had a pre-existing fixed wireless ISP that also obtained a significant amount of spectrum in most rural areas of Ireland and you had a completely new entrant, somebody that bought spectrum across the entire country, which is a start for someone to do something with for various 5G applications or various types of business cases.” Jonathan Segel, executive director of strategic innovation projects at Nokia Corp.’s mobile networks CTO group, echoed that sentiment. “It used to be the case that all mobile was provided by big operators who had coast to coast networks for coverage and it was all in licensed bands and you didn’t have to share that spectrum with anybody else,” he said. “And we’re feeling like it’s not really where the world is going to.” Lemay added: "I think we’re going to see a lot of action involving a lot of people" in the 5G space. Some Canadian cablecos, though, have said they're not interested in dipping their toes in the 5G waters. Louis Audet, CEO of Cogeco Inc. — the only major Canadian telecom not offering wireless service— recently said it wasn’t going to be getting into the wireless game even with the advent of 5G. Discussion of 5G is too often limited to mobile, said Philip Marnick, director of spectrum at the U.K. telecom regulator Ofcom. “But 5G is a new technology, it’s a new system. So the applications people talk about are robots or cars or all sorts of other strange and wonderful things,” Marnick said. “When those things come about, will it be the mobile operator providing services? Will someone turn up with their SIM card and say ‘does your robot want 25 gigabits for here or does your car want that?’ Actually no, it’s the technology being used to do something either industrial or something else.” Regulators need to ask themselves to whom they should allocate spectrum and how to distribute it to make it work, he added. A common thread through the conference’s morning session was that it isn't possible to foresee the biggest driver of 5G, just as it wasn’t possible to predict that video streaming was going to be the “killer app” for 4G networks, speakers said Wednesday. Marnick said that when asked, his team pointed people sharing videos of cats as the 4G driver and though it seemed unlikely in the past, “that’s what people are doing. People are doing the things people want to do to use the services. We need to make sure we realize the market will go the way the market goes and not the way we in the sector or the industry decides it should go. We just need to facilitate it so it can happen.” On the domestic front, Innovation Canada said it is “investing on multiple fronts” to prepare for 5G at home, according to associate deputy minister Kelly Gillis. In a morning keynote, Gillis said Canada is ready to take a leadership role on 5G and that the government was looking at how it “could best leverage the power of telecommunications, especially 5G, in reaching goals” identified through the Innovation Agenda consultation. “Getting it right on spectrum is essential for realizing 5G. In order to enable 5G in a global context we have to expand our options and broaden our approach,” Gillis said, adding that “we must increase spectrum availability in innovative ways and make every effort to harmonize spectrum use across jurisdictions,” and pointed to the government’s Communications Research Centre and its newly launched Big Data Analytics Centre as a key player in that work. — With reporting by Charelle Evelyn at cevelyn@thewirereport.ca and editing by Anja Karadeglija at akarad@thewirereport.ca

5G to be ‘crowded playground,’ conference hears

News | May 31, 2017

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5G to be ‘crowded playground,’ conference hears

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