As part of the Digital Catapult Centre Brighton taster series of events, we invited Dr Hamid Falaki, Technical Architect at the Digital Catapult Centre, London, to The FuseBox to talk about about Understanding 5G Connectivity.
Here, Hamid provides an account of the event and his thoughts and ideas around the future of 5G and opportunities for businesses.
On 8th July I had the pleasure of being invited by Phil Jones from Wired Sussex to give a talk on the 5G Vision for Future Networks, at Digital Catapult Brighton centre.
In this gathering we talked about the use cases in the media towards the likely implementation of the 5G networks that will extend our current networks in 2020.
The Group from Brighton business and academia were silent listeners at the start of the evening until Q/A session, when the real debate began around “how 5G will be different from the current networks capability”, and “how can they have their own 5G test bed in Brighton”; while my questions to the audience were-
1. What is the missing feature in today’s FIXED or Wireless Network that limits their winning business solution for Communication and Data services?
2. Do they really need a 1ms time response for such Communication and Data services?
3. What question should we be asking to better define the 5G future networks?
The answers to these questions are not simple, and yet we did our best to put some context around it through our debates. Here are few points I want to take away and summarise-
- Firstly 5G is not all about wireless networks and it is about providing Communication and Data services using all possible Access solutions and core network switching.
- On the idea of having a 5G wireless network in Brighton; my suggestion was that such solution in short term can only be over an unlicensed spectrum and the most likely air interface may be WiFi with fibre backhaul and a programmable controller acting as a switch, gateway while also providing core network functions for experimentation. This was considering to be practical with the available time and resources.
- On the idea as what applications can they develop over 5G networks; we may consider an IMS based core network with content media distribution nodes / entities to enable “Data and Communication Service Applications” to be operated in an IMS connected networks with other 5G test beds across the country.
Overall I really enjoyed the discussion with this proactive enterprising community and consider my future meeting with them will be centred on “What is the likely design and specification for a 5G test bed in Brighton” and “what can they develop as communication and data services on such a 5G test bed”.
You can see the slides from Hamid's presentation via slideshare here.
Feel free to join in and/or follow the conversation and your thoughts with us on Twitter @digicatbrighton and #digicatbrighton.
If you are interested in finding out more about the Digital Catapult Centre Brighton project and how you might get involved, we are holding a series of Breakfast Drop In Sessions that are free to attend, find out more and register to attend via this link here.
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