Matt Grob, EVP and CTO of Qualcomm Technologies, gives keynote at IEEE Globecom
SAN DIEGO–Qualcomm EVP and CTO Matt Grob this week told attendees at the IEEE Globecom conference that the telecom industry, since he started in 1991, is still dealing with some of the same fundamental issues.
More than two decades ago, he said, “The goal was to improve spectral efficiency because operators were going from analog to digital…and there wasn’t going to be enough spectrum. The industry needed more capacity for voice.”
Then in 2002, mobile connections surpassed fixed connections and the mobile Internet burst onto the scene.
“We reached the point where now mobile computing and mobile connections for Internet surpassed those for wireline and fixed. Around that time, voice became just percentage points of the total amount of traffic. We still have usage going up, spectrum, we need to use it as efficiently as possible…the operators need these solutions. It feels like the same kind of situation as at the beginning. We have to do a lot of work to make this happen.”
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Then Grob looked ahead to next-generation 5G mobile networks, attendant new applications and use cases, and what the industry needs to do to get there.
“Think of it as a new connectivity paradigm that we’ll need for 5G. In the past it was human communication. We need to set up the situation for all kinds of machines talking to each other and different paradigms of communication–anything anywhere.”
He continued: “We want to be able to converge different types of networks…and different scale. High speed devices with multimedia although down to sensors and IoT devices. So, a question that I get asked all the time is what is the vision for 5G?”
Grob’s answer, he explained, is more nuanced than a simple response. “We want scalable. We want to have everything from very high speed 4K video and beyond…although down to tiny devices in enormous numbers…and have that be serviced from a common network. We want to unify different spectrum regulatory paradigms. We want to unify different bands. The reason we want to do all of this is we want to enable new kinds of services that the operators can offer.”