Mobile internet is getting faster. Much faster. 5G mobile broadband networks are already being rolled out around the UK, including 16 city locations being developed by EE, the nation's biggest mobile network and part of BT Group. EE's first-phase sites include the busiest areas of London, Cardiff, Edinburgh, Belfast, Birmingham and Manchester, to ensure that businesses, shoppers and commuters get the fastest possible mobile performance.
With speeds of up to 2.3GB/s on the horizon, it's going to be faster than most fixed line broadband connections in the UK. And once the technology and infrastructure are fully developed, 5G currently has a theoretical maximum throughput of 10GB/s for users on standard consumer hardware.
In terms of the backend infrastructure even faster speeds are possible, with researchers from the University of Surrey's 5G Innovation Centre achieving a whopping 1TB/s – some 1,000 times faster than the highest 4G speeds.
That doesn't just mean faster internet for you and your staff, both in the office and in the field. Ultra-high-speed data also opens up a world of new applications – from keeping track of vehicles and equipment around the country, to running complex networks of factory robots and autonomous systems capable of communicating with each other, or with a cloud-based control system in near real-time.
What are we going to do with it?
With 5G, we're going to be able to work and communicate faster, more reliably and with less dependence on being in a fixed location. But that's just the beginning. In September 2018 the government announced the West Midlands 5G testbed, covering Birmingham, Coventry and Wolverhampton.
"We want the UK to be a world leader in 5G, and our ambitious testbeds and trials programme has seen groundbreaking projects set up across the country," says Minister for Digital Margot James.
Projects being developed under the scheme include hospital outpatient appointments and consultations via video chat, connected ambulances that can instantly bring in specialist medical guidance via video conferencing systems and receive patient data on the way to hospital, and live streaming and AI analysis of CCTV camera footage from buses to help tackle violent and anti-social behaviour on public transport.
Meanwhile, Jaguar Land Rover will be using 5G to help provide feedback and monitoring of its autonomous vehicle testing programme, being carried out in the same region – future autonomous vehicle convoys will also use 5G to handle the high-speed vehicle-to-vehicle communications required by their platooning systems.
A key objective of the testbed programme, James says, is to create new opportunities for UK businesses at home and abroad, and encourage inward investment. To that end, "the programme is focusing on areas where the UK has a competitive advantage – such as in scientific research, engineering talent and our rich variety of technology businesses."
As near-instantaneous connections between smart devices, smart homes and smart cities become possible, entire new industries could open up. Tom Bennett, director of mobile and converged innovations at BT, says that, with the rise of home automation and an ageing population, there's "a genuine and untapped demand where you need a lot more engineers, a lot more technicians to go into homes and connect them up."
According to Phil Baulch, BT's CIO of corporate and public sector, once we have full end-to-end 5G network speeds, devices will be able to communicate with latencies of just one or two milliseconds. When it comes to either distributed or traditional cloud-based control systems, that's a revolution.
Baulch says that, with the increasing availability of distributed edge computing systems where every device on the network is also a node in a compute cluster, "you can start to connect a city, you can start to connect everything in the home together. You can start to connect the supply chain to the factory to the distribution chain to the robotics in a house."
Introducing convergence
"Convergence" is a word you hear a lot of 5G industry bods talking about excitedly, and it goes beyond simply installing faster mobile networking hardware. In the 2015 paper 5G: The Convergence of Wireless Communications, published in Wireless Personal Communications, the authors observe that "seamless integration of a variety of air interfaces, protocols, and frequency bands, requires paradigm shifts in the way networks cooperate and complement each other to deliver data rates of several gigabits per second with end-to-end latency of a few milliseconds."
And that's exactly where the cutting edge of 5G is right now: it doesn't really matter how your ultra-fast internet connection transmits and receives your data, as long it's quick, low-latency and reliable. Where data throughput can be made faster, it will, whether that involves higher-bandwidth fibre runs between cellular towers or forthcoming Wi-Fi 6 (802.11ax) repeaters used to supplement mobile broadband in busy public spaces.
BT's Tom Bennett explains that "5G at the very simplest level is the next generation of mobile technology. So we've got 3G, 4G and now obviously 5G, but that underplays it. Of course, you will be able to get a smartphone with 5G and we are going to roll out a 5G network, but 5G is much more than that. 5G is the way in which any person or any company or organisation is going to buy connectivity."
In a converged future, when you get – for example – a BT or EE account, that connectivity plan could include ultrafast fixed line broadband, fast public Wi-Fi from more than five million hotspots nationwide and access to 4G and new 5G networks, including at home to give your broadband a speed boost if it needs it.
For businesses, convergence means that your ultra-high-speed internet package will be built to provide the same kind of fast performance when you're making a site visit to clients or working from home, as when you're at the office. And for telecoms operators, convergence means that 5G systems can be built upon and integrated with existing 4G LTE mobile broadband networks. This ensures that, even in areas where 5G has yet to be introduced, users will still get quick mobile networking speeds.
How will we get there?
Introducing 5G across the UK is by necessity going to be a step-by-step process. We're expecting the first mainstream 5G phone hardware from companies including Samsung, Sony and Huawei to become available later this year and through 2020, at which point businesses and consumers will really be able to see the difference in areas with 5G-enhanced mobile networks.
Following on from the six initial 5G city launches, further 5G networks will be popping up across the UK throughout 2019, with EE rolling out sites in Glasgow, Newcastle, Liverpool, Leeds, Hull, Sheffield, Nottingham, Leicester, Coventry and Bristol. To go with those, the company will also launch a 5G home router, allowing customers in those areas to benefit from faster-than-VDSL mobile broadband speeds.
Meanwhile, the 5GUK test network is open for business and being used to trial further 5G applications and technologies, with forthcoming agricultural trials including 5G RuralFirst's autonomous tractor testing in Shropshire in February and March.
In Bath, augmented reality tourist guides have brought history to life, while factory trials have taken place in Worcester Bosch and Yamazaki Mazak, which the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport say will experiment with preventative and assisted maintenance using robotics, big data analytics and augmented reality.
When it comes to 5G, the high-tech future of business really is coming at us fast, and its infrastructure and innovation are set to revolutionise everything from heavy industry and healthcare to retail and tourism.
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For more, visit BT.com
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
