What will 5G do?

Throughout the world, ink is being spilled and electrons exercised in a frenetic focus on fifth generation wireless technology, or 5G. The 5G discussion, with all its permutations and combinations, has grown to resemble an elementary school soccer game where everyone chases the ball, first in one direction, then another.

In classic network engineering terms, the “noise” surrounding 5G is interfering with the “signal” about just what 5G is and what is necessary for its introduction. Consideration of 5G is far more serious than the so-called 5G “race” concocted by those seeking to advantage themselves in the business or political market—especially the political market.
There are five often misunderstood facts to know about 5G:

• 5G is revolutionary because it replaces the hardware components of the network with software that “visualizes” the network by using the common language of Internet Protocol (IP).
• 5G is evolutionary as both its new radios and the core network functions are defined as a progression from 4G. Like 4G before it, in most markets 5G will roll out in steps.
• 5G is not transformational, per se. What will be transformative are the applications that will use the network. The United States was not the first to deploy any of the “G’s” of wireless networks, but nonetheless dominates the wireless ecosystem because of the innovative technologies developed by American entrepreneurs for those networks.
• 5G is a cybersecurity risk because the network is software based. Earlier networks’ reliance on centralized hardware-based functions offered a security-enhancing choke point. Distributed software-based systems, per se, are more vulnerable.
• 5G is spectrum dependent. In the long run this means new spectrum allocations. While those are underway, however, the evolution has begun using old spectrum assignments.

“Winning 5G” is not so much a “race” as it is a process. Characterizing 5G as a contest demeans its great technological progress and the policy challenges that progress presents. 5G should be more than a political talking point; the new network represents the need for a meaningful policy strategy.
What is missing in today’s 5G policy discussion is a focused identification of deliverables that go deeper and are more meaningful than the ill-defined “winning” of a so-called “5G race.” To consider this, let’s parse 5G into five (not so) easy pieces:

What will 5G do?

To listen to its proponents, 5G is on par with the genius of Edison. For equipment manufacturers it is a new revenue stream at a time when the 4G market was becoming saturated.For wireless carriers, it similarly offers a vision of high margin network-based applications in place of today’s commoditized carriage of other companies’ data. And for political actors, 5G is the perfect excitement vehicle: something new and better, the promise of which could be theoretically lost without the actor’s decisive leadership.
Perhaps, however, we should listen to Bill Stone, Verizon’s vice president of technology development and planning. Wisely, Stone recently warned, “There is a potential to overhype and under-deliver on the 5G promise.”
There is no question as to the importance of 5G. It is the most significant network overhaul in history because the alchemy of digital technology allows the transformation of what was always done in hardware to become functions accomplished in software. Then, with such a virtualized network, the power of the lingua franca of Internet Protocol (IP) takes over to eliminate the need for specific technology protocols for specific functions.
Yet, while 5G holds great promises, the wisdom of Stone’s admonition should be our North Star. It is time to take a deep breath and realize that 5G is something more than marketing slogans or technology to be weaponized for political purposes.