Ansys Elecronic Design Industry Predictions

Shawn Carpenter Program Director, 5G & Space

Deployment strategies for 5G

5G in 2021 will be all about deployment – the infrastructure and handsets are available and is being rolled out as we speak.

However, carriers have taken a very diverse range of approaches to this deployment. For example, some carriers have used long range, low frequency bands that don’t add that much bandwidth to mobile user download speeds, compared to the low-range, high frequency, high speed bands that are also part of 5G. This means that in effect, a consumer could purchase an expensive 5G phone and not necessarily experience a superior connectivity speed to the one they enjoyed with 4G / LTE. However, there will also be some areas that will be able to access the breathtakingly fast speeds that 5G is capable of.

5G deployment is also very complex. Some carriers are completely ripping out and replacing their 4G infrastructure with 5Ginfrastructure that is backwards compatible – but this is a very expensive approach. Other carriers are installing 5G equipment on 4G masts and either working to avoid interference, or actively looking at dynamic spectrum sharing – and yet more are creating two separate systems for 4G and 5G, which means buying two sets of equipment.

In short, there’s no right or wrong way of doing it. 5G is a difficult technology to deploy — the full promise of 5G must include the millimeter-wave bands that require near line-of-sight and a lot of masts and infrastructure for complete coverage.

Overall, we’ll see some disillusionment in the short- to mid-term as consumers pay for 5G handsets and don’t receive the experience they were expecting – particularly outside of dense urban areas – but in the mid- to long-term, we’ll see 5G getting closer and closer to the fast, low-latency, multi-user experience that it promises – and then we’re in really exciting territory.

Future Potential

5G has three major differentiators to 4G: it’s much faster, it can connect more users simultaneously, and it’s low latency. This is analogous to cars – there was a time when you bought a car to get from A to B. Today, cars can still get from A to B, but they also come with entertainment systems, smart navigation systems, automatic braking, cruise control, a choice of electric or petrol fuel, and soon, the ability to drive themselves.

Until we’re further down the 5G road, we won’t know how to best make use of it. Again, it’s similar to phones and GPS; there was a time when we had data on our phones and GPS, but no-one thought about services like Uber until we were further down the road towards 3G.

However, alongside the pandemic, it’s likely that we’ll see great leaps in both telemedicine and how our education system runs. Doctors will be able to perform surgery from miles away, or even in different countries, as long as the right remote access equipment is in place. Similarly, remote studying will really bed in – why study at a national university, remotely, when you could be studying with the best professor in the world, in another country? When you remove location from the equation, the possibilities are almost endless.

The other exciting potential for 5G is the CBRS band, which allows organizations to deliver a 5G signal privately, independent of operators / carriers, across a large area. This would allow a council to deliver a mobile signal to a remote village, for example, or a large hospitality provider to deploy 5G services across its site, replacing two-way radios with rich multimedia services. The infrastructure for these kinds of services is already available, and we expect to see the first sites rolling out in 2021.

About the Author

Shawn Carpenter received his BEE degree in electrical engineering from the University of Minnesota Institute of Technology in 1988, and an MSEE in Electrical Engineering from Syracuse University in 1991 concurrently with the General Electric Thomas Edison Advanced Course in Engineering program. He has served as a Senior Microwave Engineer in Module Design and Array Technology for the GE Aerospace Electronics Laboratory (Syracuse, NY), VP Sales and Marketing for Sonnet Software, Inc., and Director, Sales & Marketing for Delcross Technologies.

Shawn joined Ansys Inc. during the 2015 acquisition of Delcross Technologies and is currently a Program Director for 5G and Space applications. His current interests include phased array modeling techniques for MIMO and adaptive beamforming, installed antenna-host interactions, mm-wave radar sensor modeling and physical channel modeling for electrically large environments.

Tags: Predictions

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 9th, 2021 at 5:00 am. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.