2017 is not the year of 5G, and here's why

Debunking the nonsense and hype around the "next generation" of wireless data

I have, finally, declared war on 5G.

I've been sitting quite quietly for the last couple of years waiting for the other shoe to drop on the whole 5G 'ultrafast internets for all' issue, but as OFCOM moves towards signing it up for actual public consumption and my pre-MWC inbox fills with "exciting announcements" (read: tripe) from vendors about how amazing and exciting 5G is going to be, I've decided it's all reached five to midight a little bit.

Thus, to try and save souls and sanity among the UK IT industry, I thought I'd try and cut a swathe through the bullshit and help IT budget holders try and figure out how much they're being lied to and misled by this latest bandwagon (spoiler: probably lots).

The approach was simple: I contacted tech vendors far and wide and asked them three key questions:

What is 5G?

How are you going to bring it to your end users?

Why should they even want it?

I was asked to elaborate on these deliberately vague and silly questions on several occasions, and flatly refused every single time. You're not getting me that easy, Dwayne Toddhunter, VP of Communications. This time, you're going to dance to my cheeky little tune.

From those who played along without kicking up a fuss, the answers I received were erm... illuminating, and I'll tackle some of the finer replies as I try to intersperse them with some good sense.

"New economic research"

Let's start with O2, who has recently "released new economic research which finds that 5G infrastructue is set to outstrip the economic benefits of fibre broadband for the UK by 2026".

This, of course, is tied quite politically into governmental ‘post-Brexit' strategy to try and deflect from the other, potentially numerous, financial difficulties of leaving the EU, but nevertheless - O2 maintains that 5G will be "twice as fast as fibre".

This is despite, (as we'll learn later, oh we will learn) the fact nobody is yet quite clear what spectrum it will run on, or how the hugely expensive infrastructure to roll it out is going to stack up next to the so-called "productivity boost" of £3bn a year we'll apparently all enjoy when 5G replaces 4G (and, apparently, all broadband).

Cobham Wireless, which of course will be demoing at MWC this year (and giving you a keyring), reckons it's nailed 10Gbps (that's 10,000Mbps), via what it's calling an "IoT proof-of-concept solution". Neat stuff, but again - with no infrastructure nailed down on an international level, this is just more spluttering pipedreams.

Interestingly, Mobiles.co.uk told me 5G is only going to provide "100mb per second in metropolitan areas". That's not 10Gbps, and certainly isn't "twice as fast as fibre". So much baloney, whizzing around my inbox.

Time-out. Let's get some ground level sense on all this.

Professor William Webb is a senior member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), as well as the author of a book called "The 5G Myth" so, given the opportunity, I just had to push him those same three questions. But first, here's Webb's general argument as to why 5G as it's being sold is probably nothing but dead-eyed, half-minute-long handshakes by Mr Corporate Kool-Aid and friends:

2017 is not the year of 5G, and here's why

Debunking the nonsense and hype around the "next generation" of wireless data

"The current vision is 100x faster and 1000x more capacity than 4G. But 4G can already deliver 100Mbps - much faster than anyone could possibly want, so going even faster is pointless," explained Webb.

"More capacity is good, but comes at an increasing cost and MNOs (mobile network operators) are seeing declining revenues, so are disinclined to invest in expensive solutions and are looking for ways to expand capacity within 4G. So neither aspects of this vision make much sense. Instead, ways to deliver better, more consistent coverage at current data rates would be much more valuable."

Asked to technically define 5G and how it'll work - in strict line with my questions - Webb told me:

"It is still very unclear how 5G will work as there are many different elements to it and many different strategies being followed by different organisations and research groups," which is basically what I expected.

However, he does believe one of two main variants, will appear - one of which is quite strange indeed when compared to our existing over-the-air infrastructure and delivery for 3G and 4G:

"One is the use of 5G to deliver fixed wireless broadband, which is a wireless connection to the home, as opposed to using fibre, and is likely to first appear in the US in the coming years. The other approach is to enhance 4G to make it faster, more responsive and able to handle more data, which seems more likely to happen across many operators over the coming years. However, how much improvement will be delivered and by when is still unclear."

In terms of how our "5G" will be delivered, Webb sees the need for "physical equipment at base station sites which would be within core networks".

"It will make use of emerging radio concepts such as large antenna arrays that can steer beams," he added.

Magic beams

It's the wireless angle and its beams which seems to be capturing the public imagination, and what OFCOM (not to mention O2 and friends) seem to be bandwaggoning on.

OFCOM offered an update on its thinking on 8 February 2017, defining 5G as "the next generation of mobile technologies" which will offer "extremely fast data speeds" for "innovative new services across different industry sectors".

When I asked Webb whether the toss-up between infrastructure cost and labour to lay it out versus end users needs would match, he replied:

"At the moment it is very unclear how 5G will compare to its predecessors in terms of user requirements. Most users require consistent connectivity - the ability to watch video or browse websites wherever they are. 5G promises to deliver faster data rates where there is already coverage, but whether users actually require this is debatable. Hence, there are many, such as myself, who have serious doubts about the vision for 5G and whether it is well aligned with the requirements of users."

Nevertheless, OFCOM's main drum to bang is the IoT craze.

"5G should help the evolution of IoT services and applications to improve interaction between different platforms," it gushes.

That's around a group of three different spectra: 700MHz, 3.4-3.8GHz and 24.25-27.5 GHz.

The latter, OFCOM (and the Radio Spectrum Policy Group) want to position as a "pioneer brand" for 5G "in Europe" (whatever this is, considering we're leaving it).

2017 is not the year of 5G, and here's why

Debunking the nonsense and hype around the "next generation" of wireless data

Remember: We are currently a country whose government and selected vendors can only ‘prove' superfast broadband has successfully rolled out by, basically, lying about it. And unless I'm very much mistaken, running 5G for all over the entire country would largely involve replacing or scrapping the whole lot - surely making BT and OpenReach's already flawed rollout a spectacular waste of a lot of money.

The 2020 publicised date for even a semi-changeover to 5G is poignant, as that's the ongoing target for ‘superfast' broadband to reach 100 per cent UK coverage anyway. The whole thing coughs repeatedly into the face of logic, on a crowded morning commuter train with all the windows nailed shut.

It's not just William Webb who's in agreement with me here. Professor Peter Cochrane - ex-CTO of BT, futurist and Computing columnist - described 5G as vendors "promising the earth in a frenzy of promotion and misconceptions".

Like Webb, Cochrane worries about splits on standards and delivery, prophesying, this time, "at least three" standards. Writing in mid-2016, he said those standards would come from different approaches in the EU, US and South East Asia.But,now we're jumping out of the EU, who knows where that will leave the UK?

"At a modest estimate, mobile providers need 10 times more cell sites to even approach 30 per cent internet traffic transported. Why should 5G be any different? It actually needs even more infrastructure than 3G or 4G to deliver," he pointed out.

Some vendors, admittedly, are close to coming clean on all this. Joe Marsella, CTO for EMEA at Ciena, described the benefits 5G will offer, but couched it in a little good sense:

"One of the biggest user benefits of the advent of 5G will be increased bandwidth," he told me.

"This will obviously have a ripple effect from the wireless domain onto the wireline network and require higher capacity backhaul networks to be delivered to connect the user to the world. If one thing is clear, though, it will be that 5G will demand much more of the network than simply increased bandwidth. We will also need to enable a much lower latency to the user to enable a new world of applications which are being envisioned and this will further push storage and compute resources closer to the edge."

Like most of his peers, Marsella wasn't so quick to explain where the "higher capacity backhaul networks" are going to come from. But then, it's not his problem really, is it?

Texas Instruments chief technologist Ahmad Bahai, interestingly, insists we can get to 5G by "optimising and enhancing the existing wireless use case to support a 100x increase in network capacity".

Read this carefully: optimising and enhancing a use case? That just doesn't even make sense. Redefine our expectations, or what? Anyway, he also insists:

2017 is not the year of 5G, and here's why

Debunking the nonsense and hype around the "next generation" of wireless data

"Wireless connectivity is rapidly replacing many forms of cable connectivity. Wireless is the primary mode of broadband access in many parts of the world. Also, many portable devices no longer provide USB or display interface delegating all communications to wireless links."

Which is true, but nobody ever said we had to overhaul the entire comms infrastructure of entire countries because you can't plug a LAN cable into an iPad. Tail wagging the dog, etc.

I can be anything you want me to be, sugar

John Lillistone, head of capacity and coverage products at Arqiva, took me on a bit of an emotional rollercoaster. He said "the question of exactly what 5G is, or will be, is not as simple as it sounds as it is currently many things to many people,"

Nevertheless, while Lillistone probably doesn't really know what 5G is, he's certain it's going to be BIG.

"Super fast" speeds are merely "the tip of the iceberg" with 5G, he whispers, doubtless gazing toward the faraway mountains and twirling his majestic long beard.

"One of the first applications, however, is likely to be the delivery of fast broadband to premises over wireless rather than ‘fixed' networks," he admits, rather less epically.

"Although fibre still has a role to play given the limited range of the very high frequency bands needed to deliver the signal."

Not to be dissuaded, however, Lillistone crescendos again:

"Beyond broadband and fixed wireless access, 5G is best thought of as a technology able to connect anything to anything else and the internet almost instantaneously. Machine to machine connections for the internet of things, autonomous vehicles with millisecond latency and virtual and augmented reality applications will also benefit greatly from the quality and robustness of the connection made possible by 5G."

I mean it's all technically true, but we can also enthuse about how one day we'll be able to zip to Saturn via a custom black hole generator to do our shopping. Sure, it's not been invented or implemented yet but we understand how it works, so let's get excited.

What technology will it all run on, then, John?

"No-one can really be sure for the time being, but the equipment makers are investing a lot of energy in this and some MNOs are responding very positively."

John! John, no. You tease!

And so it drones on. Andrew Cartledge, "mobile expert" at Mobiles.co.uk calls 5G "the next generation of mobile connection," before readily admitting "there has yet to be an officially decided standard for 5G mobile, so any expectations of performance are purely speculative at this stage".

But no matter - it'll be sorted by 2020 (that date again) and "is set to herald a boost in new jobs and businesses, as well as the opportunity for economic growth".

I won't bore you recounting the dozens of other hugely similar patters I received. I'm just going to stop here.

But here's my advice to you, from my (admittedly limited, but hugely irritating) findings: