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5G investments high, despite lack of standardisation
Tue, 10th Nov 2015
FYI, this story is more than a year old

Driven by regional, national government, wireless carrier and vendor initiatives, 5G R-D and trial investments will account for nearly $5 billion by 2020, following a CAGR of nearly 40% over the next five years, according to new research.

The research shows nearly 70% of these investments will target large scale commercial trial networks in early pioneering countries such as Japan and South Korea.

Despite a lack of standardisation, vendors are aggressively investing in 5G development efforts with a principal focus on new transmission schemes, antenna technologies, and higher frequency bands, according to the researchers.

The 5G networks are expected to utilise a variety of spectrum bands, ranging from established cellular bands to millimetre wave frequencies. The 5G standardisation activities are expected to commence between 2015 and 2016.

Although 5G is yet to be standardised, some of the collectively accepted attributes of the technology include new air interface transmission schemes, new spectrum bands, spectrum aggregation, Massive MIMO, beam forming, D2D (Device to Device) communications and self-backhauling, among others.

According to the report, while LTE and LTE-Advanced deployments are still underway, wireless carriers and vendors have already embarked on R-D initiatives to develop so-called '5G' technology, with a vision of commercialisation by 2020.

5G is essentially a revolutionary paradigm shift in wireless networking to support the throughput, latency, and scalability requirements of future use cases such as extreme bandwidth augmented reality applications and connectivity management for billions of M2M (Machine to Machine) devices, researchers say.

Key leaders in this space includes Alcatel-Lucent, Ericsson, Fujitsu, Google, Huawei, IBM, Vodafone and ZTE, according to the research.