5G ‘Not Just a Faster Version’ of 4G, UK’s Digital TV Group Summit Told

“5G is not just a faster version of 4G,” said Matt Stagg, BT Sport director-mobile strategy, last week at the annual summit of the U.K.’s Digital Television Group in London. He said the much-vaunted low latency for 5G “only happened because the automotive industry needs it for braking autonomous cars -- so that cars stop at a red light.” Low latency “is expensive to provide from the network equipment,” but not everybody needs it, said Stagg. VoD, digital TV, autonomous vehicles “all have different requirements,” he said. Simon Fell, former director-technology and innovation at the European Broadcasting Union, backed up Stagg’s scenario of networks collapsing when all users -- consumers and professionals -- share the same pot of data and something happens to increase demand dramatically. “4G does not work under extreme load,” said Fell. “I was in Munich when there was a series of attacks and as more and more people used their phones to access sites like Facebook, the network collapsed.” News crews with 4G cameras, he said, “could not communicate and they had to bring in a satellite truck.” With “sliced” 5G, he said, consumer overload wouldn't affect broadcasters in that scenario because they would not be competing for bandwidth. Asked whether using 5G might be the way to distribute data-hungry 8K broadcasts, Fell said NHK is experimenting with 8K over 5G: “But who will pay?” Guido Meardi, CEO of V-Nova, the British company that promotes the new Perseus IPTV compression codec, said tests his company did showed it's possible to reduce an 8K data stream of 50 Mbps to between 30 and 35 Mbps, which could easily be sent over a 5G link.