The fifth-generation (5G) wireless mobile technology will require new frequency spectrum to embrace the rising long-term data traffic demand for mobile communication, said a senior official at Ericsson, the Sweden-based multinational wireless network gear provider.
Jan Farjh, vice president of standardization and industry at Ericsson, said the 4G network has showcased "the future of mobile broadband," and the 5G will bring in a "networked society," which will provide a common network platform with dynamic and secure network slices.
To meet the expectations for the 5G by the target year 2020, the global community should work together to build a standardized structure to handle the high-rate data used by smartphones and various other devices, he said.
"If the data traffic continues as it is now, we need more bandwidth for dense network and more spectrum for efficiency. If you can get more spectrum, then we can provide the network performance," Farhj said during an interview Monday with Yonhap News Agency on the sidelines of the 19th International Telecommunications Union Plenipotentiary Conference underway in the southern port city of Busan.
Farhj noted that the 2015 World Radio Conference (WRC) will focus on the allocation of additional spectrum below 6.5 GHz for mobile communication, and the 2019 meeting will move toward next-generation wireless access above 10 GHz.
The Ericsson official said an advanced sensor system that uses less energy but has high-rate data transmission capacity is one of the areas his company has been working on to prepare for the 5G network innovation.
"That's where we put into a lot of research efforts to see how you can continue to send high-rate data with very low power in an efficient way," he said.
Farhj noted that the European Union as well as Asian nations have poured money and resources to develop the next-generation mobile technology and related industry, saying it's time to align those efforts to develop specified standards for the 5G network.
"The EU has an ambition to work with Korea, China and Japan," he said.
"The earlier the better. If we align the research level, then we'll be aligned at the organizational level as well."
Having a global standard for terminal and infrastructure for 5G will allow network gear manufacturers and software developers to invent new products based on a mobile system usable across the world.
"The common goal is to have a global standard, so we can use the economy of scale. That makes it cheaper for end users."
Farjh said the global community is making efforts to have a worldwide consensus to move to the next network era.
"Technology will always evolve, and we will have something new in year 2020. I think it's good to work towards a common goal," he said. "We will talk about 5G now, and it will eventually happen if we can have a specified global standardization, it will be more probable, and it will be more successful."
Competition on the product level will continue while governments and companies around the globe collaborate to reach a global consensus, Farjh said, expressing hope for the Swedish vendor's continued good performance in the new environment.
"You don't specify everything, so it still makes room for different performance for different terminals as well as in the infrastructure," he said.
"The standardization is one part where you can agree on, and it's still open for competitions between different members." (Yonhap)
