The demands and business contexts of 2020 and beyond are expected to be addressed by the fifth generation of mobile technology (5G). To empower a society that is fully mobile and connected is our goal. There are number of socio-economic transformations out of which some are unimagined are supposed to be empowered by 5G including those for well-being, productivity and sustainability. The broad range of use cases and business models expected, tremendous the required multi-layer densification in enabling this and growth in connectivity and density/volume of traffic are branding the demands of a fully mobile and connected society.
The market is driven by changes in operator contexts, technology and customer. Soon there will be a time where everything will be connected and all the instant information will be just a touch away. Some of major aspects of the market are:
- Consumers
Significant recent technology advancement is represented by the advent of smartphones and tablets. They will have significant role in health, security, safety, and social life applications, as well as controlling home appliances, cars and other machines. To support such trends as multi-device and multi-access used by consumers, a comprehensive view of the future consumer’s demands is essential.
- Enterprises
Many of the trends in the consumer segment apply to future enterprises as well. Enterprises will look for solutions to address security and privacy challenges associated with this hybrid type of usage. The proliferation of cloud-based services will enable application portability across multiple devices and domains and will offer major opportunities for enterprises.
- Verticals
The next wave of mobile communication is to mobilize and automate industries and industry processes. This is widely referred to as machine-type communication (MTC) and the IoT. IoT will also have a wide range of requirements on networking such as reliability, security, performance (latency, throughput), among others.
- Partnerships
In many markets today, operators have already started to leverage partnerships with the so-called over the-top (OTT) players to deliver packaged services to end users. OTT players will move to deliver more and more applications that require higher quality, lower latency, and other service enhancing capabilities on demand and in a highly flexible and programmable way.
- Infrastructure
Breakthrough technology advancements of the recent years (e.g., SDN, NFV, big data, All-IP) will change the way networks are being constructed and managed. Operators will continue developing own services, but also expand their business reach through partnerships for both the infrastructure as well as the application development aspects.
- Services
A global business model evolution of mobile operators’ services will include the evolution of current services as well as the emergence of new ones. Currently the most common services provided by mobile operators include point-to-point personal communication and (best effort) data services such as Web services.
New services will emerge for growing and new market segments such as automated industries and smart user environments, public safety and mission critical services. Many other services will be developed by leveraging capabilities such as big data, proximity, geo-community services and many others.
5G is going to be a revolution in technology having huge number of use cases out of which many are yet to be discovered. To enable a society that is entirely mobile and connected, 5G is an end to-end ecosystem. The 5G vision has provided guidance to the definition of requirements, architecture and other aspects such as spectrum and IPR.
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