36 | Editor’s Corner—5G is in the eye of the beholder | ----------- | |
FierceWireless: Wireless | 2018-11-09 02:00 | ????0? | |
Verizon is probably the most justified to date to actually call its 5G Home service a 5G service. It’s not using equipment built on 3GPP’s 5G standard, it’s using the Verizon Technical Forum specification for 5G. But it’s close enough to pass the test for most in-the-know analysts, and we’re told it’s a relatively easy upgrade to the real deal when that’s ready. (That’s not to say that I think Verizon’s fixed wireless access version of 5G is really all that mind-blowing. It’s not. But that’s a different discussion.)Even when you ask a group of CTOs what 5G is—which is what Chris Nicoll, principal analyst at ACG Research, did when he moderated the CTO panel at Mobile World Congress Americas back in September—you end up getting four different versions. Sprint CTO John Saw was the first to answer the question and, among other things, he mentioned that he’s excited to see who the next Uber is going to be in the healthcare industry—as an example of what 5G can do.These things do matter. I remember when people got upset back in the `90s when the first AT&T—the one before Cingular and the current iteration of AT&T—labeled its service “PCS” when it didn’t use PCS spectrum. The industry has tried in past technology generational shifts to differentiate between “Gs” and even use terms like 3.5G before jumping into the next one. But given the state of 5G, it appears there’s no putting the genie back in the bottle.“Everybody,” said Dan Warren, head of 5G Research at Samsung Electronics Research Institute and former senior director of technology at GSMA. “Everybody in the industry is to blame because it’s all been going on for about five years and nobody has ever tried to stop it. But that’s because, I think, it is so contentious” and the definition is so broad that it would be almost impossible to stop.Once the bandwagon started to roll about six years ago, he tried to put some sense into the discussion. But after about six to nine months into it, he gave up. “People were talking so broadly about 5G,” for several years and none of the definitions aligned much. Sure, there were some common themes but they were talking use cases and not technology. “You couldn’t pin down a specific definition of 5G and I don’t think you ever will,” he said. -- ???????? | |||
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