San Francisco, CA. The 5G digitalization transformation was the topic of a SEMICON West presentation by Sree Koratala, vice president, head of technology, Ericsson. She described 5G, unlike previous wireless generations, as representing a shift from consumer to industry use cases.
Ericsson, she said, has a presence in 180 countries and participates in carrying 40% of the world’s mobile traffic. From that vantage point, she said, “Ericsson predicts there will be 29 billion connected devices by 2022—a mind-bogging number—with 18 billion of those being IoT devices.” The IoT embraces cars, sensors, meters, wearables, and buildings all getting connected and will have an economic impact of $11 trillion by 2025.
She outlined the history of wireless mobile communications, noting that the first 2G, GSM digital phones appeared in 1991. 3G networks with feature phones emerged in 1998, enabling mobile broadband and browsing. In 2008, 4G appeared. 5G, she said, will be unlike any of the previous technologies, serving multiple industries and offering new areas and opportunities for growth. Use cases will vary widely, she emphasized—there will not be a single use case for IoT, which will span the gamut from logistics to smart agriculture.
The New Radio technology, she said, will rely on massive array elements with beamforming leading to lower losses and MIMO offering better capacity. Frequencies will extend from 3 to 40 GHz with 28 and 39 GHz to be common in the United States.
She noted that data centers are evolving to the cloud and incorporating software-defined networking and network slicing. The 5G building blocks are in place, leading to truly intelligent platform-based networks, with trials throughout the remainder of 2017 and launch in 2018.
