Get ready for the world of 5G

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Get ready for the world of 5G, a place where mobile communications will reach into nearly all facets of modern life: vehicles, railways, home appliances, offices, factories. Almost everything around us will be connected in a world where “the Internet of things” will have firmly taken hold.

In the next five years, 5G is expected to take off. When it does, it will become the wireless standard that helps underpin the next brave new world of connectivity.

“5G is something for a networked society in 2020,” explains Yoshio Honda, chairman of the EBC Telecommunications Equipment Committee. “It’s a platform to cover many applications, not only mobile phones.”

Today, 5G remains in the planning stages. Indeed, engineers are still debating and trying to figure out exactly what form and roles the next-generation standard should take.

“Everyone is trying to find out what 5G is, what the requirements are, and what we should do about it,” Honda says. “We don’t know what kind of applications we will have. Many things can be supported by the 5G platform.”

The goal isn’t simply about getting faster speeds, but also drawing up standards by which a greater variety of devices can be connected, as well as ensuring reliability (especially important for traffic systems, for example), extending battery life and installing more extensive infrastructure, to mention just some of the areas.

In the meantime, engineers and regulators are struggling to manage the wireless spectrum, which has become highly congested as mobile devices have proliferated. It’s a problem that needs to be dealt with now, never mind 2020.

European officials are studying one solution: making operators (or “incumbents”) already using a certain band spectrum share it with others. The idea is called licensed shared access (LSA), and it is one of the committee’s key advocacy points.

“If you have a government system, like radar, then the operator is not using the spectrum all the time. That means at certain times and locations, the [spectrum] is available,” says Honda. “So we are saying, ‘Why don’t we use this spectrum under certain conditions?’”

Ericsson Japan, its fellow EBC committee member Nokia Solutions and Networks Japan, plus Qualcomm Japan, made this proposal last year in a meeting with officials of Japan’s Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications. The response was positive, according to Honda.

“So the question is, ‘Why not use it?’ They wrote down the idea, and the next step would be implementation,” he says.

Ericsson and Nokia are the committee’s only member companies, so given its small size, most of the committee’s activities are conducted jointly with others in the industry, and/or with the EBC Telecommunications Carriers Committee, which has a single member, BT Japan. The two EBC committees also have many other overlapping issues.

As with a number of other EBC committees, Honda’s committee advocates the harmonisation of certification procedures and technical standards.

Japan introduced the Supplier’s Self Verification of Conformity (SVC) in 2004. The EBC welcomed the move, but today points out the system is “limited to wired telecommunications terminals in general, and that the application has not been expanded to other telecommunications equipment, except for 3G/LTE and WiFi functions in mobile terminals”, as the committee states in the 2013 EBC white paper.

The two sides have also worked out a mutual recognition agreement (MRA). Yet, despite the name, the MRA still requires two separate processes for the devices to gain approval in both markets. The committee wants the agreement to follow through so that both sides will “mutually accept each other’s regulatory requirements and certifications for telecommunications products”.

“If the product is certified or recognised in Europe, then automatically it can be used in Japan. That’s the idea. But that’s still a long way off,” Honda adds.

He concedes that expecting to have a single set of regulations among different countries in a highly complex field like telecommunications is “very difficult” to be realised at this point.

Yet, ironically, the devices used to communicate and even organise people’s lives already incorporate high levels of technical standardisation. Picking up his smartphone, Honda says, “You can use this mobile phone in Japan or Europe — basically everywhere. This really is ‘harmonised’.”

So, it’s the regulations that throw up the barriers, not the hardware or engineering. “Of course, we can survive with differing regulations,” Honda says. “But we do want a better environment.”

Key advocacy points

• Standards and certification – The EU and Japan should accept each other’s technical standards and certifications, a move that could be achieved through the FTA/EPA.

• Spectrum harmonisation – The Japanese government should work with other countries to establish a globally harmonised spectrum allocation for international mobile telecommunications systems.

• Spectrum sharing – The government should further study the concept of licensed shared access of spectrum with the view of introducing it to Japan.