5G Offers Capabilities LTE Could Never Match, Speakers Say

Consumers can’t wait for the launch of 5G, but further enhancement to 4G LTE will have to come first, said Qualcomm Senior Vice President Dean Brenner at a Politico Live event Tuesday. “It’s crucial that today, and I mean literally today, we deliver tremendous enhancements to 4G and accelerate the timing of 5G, and we’re doing precisely that,” he said. Brenner said 5G will have to use low-, mid- and high-band spectrum, across licensed, unlicensed and shared bands. “In other words, by using every sliver of spectrum, 5G will provide the type of wireless connectivity that we can only dream about today,” he said. Fifth-generation service also will mean what Qualcomm calls “the massive internet of things,” he said. The IoT already is happening over 4G, but massive IoT, with billions of connected devices, will require 5G, he said. Some use cases -- from autonomous cars to remote brain surgery to very-high-performance robotics -- will require more than 4G, Brenner said. “No one would do these things with 4G, but the goal is to enable them with 5G from the ground up,” he said. AT&T is “still trying to understand the capabilities of the bands” that will make up 5G service through ongoing tests, said Joan Marsh, AT&T senior vice president-regulatory. “Think about very, very wide bands,” she said. “As opposed to the smaller bands that we deal with today, think about hundreds of gigahertz put together.” The use of wide bands will drive 5G “in terms of speed, in terms of low latency, in terms of different applications,” she said. LTE will remain important, Marsh said. “LTE has a long runway, so don’t think of 5G as a replacement for 4G because there’s a lot of things that LTE is capable of doing,” she said. AT&T is densifying its network to pave the way for 5G, Marsh said. “Think about ubiquitous deployment of small cells, distributed antenna systems, picocells, other small cells in the local area, that’s really going to densify the network,” she said. LTE is very fast and “does broadband very well, but it’s harder to make it do other things,” said Steve Crowley, a consulting engineer. Brenner is right, some applications would be difficult on LTE, Crowley said. “Basically, there’s more delay,” he said. “You have more latency in LTE that’s built into the physical layer if you will, the actual radio part, that’s locked in.” LTE is evolving, but “you’re still locked into the framework,” he said. “In the meantime, technology improves.”