Europe and South Korea unite to standardize 5G, even though true 4G still isn’t available

Europe, perhaps a little bit embarrassed about being so far behind the US’s deployment of 4G LTE, has announced that it will work together with South Korea to develop the next-gen 5G standard. Both the EU and South Korea will work to harmonize the spectrum requirements of 5G networks, too, to ensure easy global roaming (at least between Europe and Asia, anyway). As you may be aware, though, all of this is much easier said than done: While carriers and marketing bods are keen to move onto 5G for obvious reasons (money!!!), the rest of the industry is still working on LTE and LTE Advanced, with no real intention of moving to 5G any time soon.

Over the year or so, we’ve started to see some early trials of purported “5G” networks. We say purported because, at the moment, 5G doesn’t have an actual definition — it just means something that’s somehow faster or better than 4G, but has had “5G” strapped on to make it sound a bit sexier. As you’re probably aware if you read ExtremeTech, it’s not inherently hard to beam oodles amount of data through the air — but doing it efficiently, from a device the size of a smartphone, and getting hundreds of patent holders to sign off on it… that’s another matter entirely. (Samsung’s 5G demo, for example, used a van full of batteries and antennas.)

Almost indefinitely faster speeds are possible with more antennas and more power… but that doesn’t necessarily work in something the size of a smartphone.

The main problem with standardizing 5G, though, is that LTE has a long, long way to go. LTE was designed from the get-go to be used for decades. The clue is in the name: Long-Term Evolution. As we have already seen with LTE-Advanced, this is a mobile network technology that has the ability to scale up gracefully and efficiently — and there are enough provisions and space for expansion in the standard that it could stick around for a long time come. Trying to push a brand new 5G standard before the first commercial LTE-Advanced deployments seems a little hasty.
But hey, it’s not like we should be surprised. Believe it or not, but LTE-A — which is still only being trialed! — was originally designated as the first 4G wireless system. WiMax, HSPA+, and original LTE were merely 3G networks until American and Canadian carriers lobbied the ITU into designating anything significantly faster than 3G as 4G — and thus WiMax was relabeled as 4G, along with HSPA+ and LTE. If ITU had stuck to its guns, the world would still be using 3G, with 4G just about to arrive.

One of Samsung’s ’5G’ lab tests

Nomenclature aside, though, the main thing is that conversations around the 5G standard need to begin soon. The rest of the tech industry is moving too fast for anything other than an accelerated timeline: It just doesn’t work to have consumers upgrade from their current 4G phone to another 4G phone, when every other bullet point on the box is bigger and faster. If the ITU doesn’t standardize 5G, then there’s every chance that someone at Verizon or AT&T will simply do it anyway — perhaps in quotation marks first, but it’ll quickly become a de facto standard as other companies hurry to catch up. The EU and South Korea say they want to have “the broad definition” of 5G nailed down by the end of 2015.
As for what form 5G will eventually take, my bet is that it’ll just be a more-advanced version of LTE with some neat new features and download speeds in the gigabits-per-second range. Hopefully this is the kind of technology that Europe and South Korea intend to work on, rather than van-sized tech demos that are the telecommunications equivalent of car drag racing: Exciting and headline-inducing, but ultimately rather pointless.

Posted in: Future Technology