5G in 'First Quarter,' Hinges on AI, IoT Advances

5G wireless is just getting started and how it will look a few years ahead no one knows for sure, speakers said Wednesday and Tuesday at Mobile World Congress Los Angeles. 5G will build on other changes in technology and, unlike 4G, which was primarily oriented to the consumer market, has the biggest implications for businesses, speakers said.

“No one wireless solution can solve all the challenges of the 5G era,” said Boingo Wireless CEO Mike Finley. “Convergence of multiple technologies … is the answer.” Boingo relies on cellular, Wi-Fi and shared spectrum, he said.

Advances in industry depend on the combination of 5G, AI and the IoT, said Laxmi Akkaraju, Cognite senior vice president-strategy. “There’s so much potential for our society and for the planet if we can get this trifecta right,” she said. “The groundwork has been laid,” she said. Never before have we seen two similarly “tectonic” trends come together at once, as have the growth of the cloud and the launch of 5G networks, said Jefferson Wang, Accenture global 5G lead.

The biggest impact of fifth-gen will be for businesses, predicted Lee Klarich, Palo Alto Networks chief product officer: “Where the new opportunity is, where the expansion opportunity is, is very different than the past.” Manufacturing, agriculture, utilities, the healthcare industry and smart cities will be among big beneficiaries, he said. They are "some of the most security conscious organizations,” Klarich said. “They see the power of 5G, but they’re going to bring with that a set of requirements that are very, very, very different than what has been seen in cellular technologies in the past,” he said: “They are going to be driving the standards.”

It's the first generation of wireless where the most important changes happen outside the phone, said Don McGuire, Qualcomm chief marketing officer. Consumers will be able to text or call from inside crowded venues, which they often can’t today because of network congestion, he said. “Unlocking that sharableness of experiences is a really killer use case.” People will be better able to work while they commute using a 5G network, he said.

McGuire said major U.S. carriers are leading on use of high-band spectrum for 5G. Like all parts of 5G, millimeter wave is just getting started, he said. “We’re still in the first quarter of the game.”

Networks are “transitioning” and carriers are building non-stand-alone 5G on top of LTE, said Ishwar Parulkar, Amazon Web Services chief technologist-telecom and edge cloud: “You don’t realize the full potential of 5G in that state. We’re still not there.”

Industry has made “tremendous progress” on machine learning and analytics, said Mike Pollitt, Boston Dynamics chief sales officer. “We now can digest and analyze volumes of data that we couldn’t previously, and drive actual insights.” Many of his company’s customers in asset-intensive industries like energy production that could benefit, haven’t yet, he said. “Our plants have old equipment,” he said: “We’re going to be dealing” with old plants “for decades to come.” The data gap “is really the inhibitor,” he said.