The telecommunications industry is reaching broader consensus on what the minimum technical parameters should be for 5G wireless communication. In a new draft document, the International Telecommunications Union spells out specifications that are clearly aimed at shouldering the burdens of the Internet of Things. V3 has the details:
The draft document contains several eye-catching figures, perhaps none more so than the requirement that 5G base stations should have the capacity to support up to one million device connections over a square mile.
The inclusion of this requirement is no doubt related to the importance 5G is expected to have in providing the coverage for Internet of Things deployments, particularly in cities where a mix of phones, cars and items like lampposts will all vie for connectivity.
To meet this huge demand the ITU also says all 5G base stations should offer top level speeds of 20Gbps download speeds and 10Gbps uploads, which would then be split between all users connected to the base station.
This is the minimum speed requirement that ITU has put forward, so it could be far in excess of this, potentially offering end users speed of several hundreds megabytes a second.
By way of comparison, today's 4GLTE base stations can deliver about 1Gbps of download speed, so the ITU wants 5G to be a significant upgrade indeed.
The report also calls for vast improvements in network latency, with enhanced mobile broadband service latency dropping from 20ms to 0.4 ms; low-latency commnication latency should be no higher than 0.1ms.
What's next? The ITU expects the draft specifications to get final approval at a meeting in November. It's following that stage when carriers and device makers can start actually executing the 5G upgrade around an agreed-up set of standards. It will likely take a couple of years for broad commercialization of 5G networks, but that event is now on the horizon.
With 5G and its implications for IoT, the notion of wireless networks has dramatically changed. "There is a tendency to view 5G as a faster variant of 4G designed to improve the performance of smartphones," says Constellation Research VP and principal analyst Andy Mulholland. "This draft specification makes very clear the role that 5G has to play in the delivery of IoT, focusing on density of connections and latency of responses as aspects necessary for effective operation of sophisticated services such as self-driving cars."
