Will the promise of 5G get bogged down in cost concerns over necessary test and measurement advances?
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Want to hear a good one? How many accountants does it take to roll out a “5G” network? It depends, what’s your return on investment?
I know, not very funny but that’s how it is when the bean counters enter the equation. All the engineering fun of experimenting with new technologies and speculating on the future of cool new innovations in areas like beam forming, propagation models, and exotic waveforms and access schemes take a back seat to the less exciting topics of capital expense, operating expense and ROI.
The sobering reality is that to be successful, the costs of next-generation 5G mobile phones and services need to remain roughly the same as their 4G counterparts regardless of the technologies deployed or performance improvements delivered. Wireless analysts predict operators will need to reduce the cost per bit to one-one thousandths of today’s 4G networks to achieve this goal. When discussing the future of 5G and its business cases, Qualcomm CTO Matthew Grob summed it up best at the 2016 Mobile World Congress when he said, “It’s all about cost, cost, cost … .”
Leaping over the 5G hurdles
When we talk about 5G, three big technology hurdles often dominate the conversation – crazy low latency of less than one millisecond, high data throughput of more than one gigabit per second to support high-definition video and virtual reality and massive connectivity to accommodate 50 billion new IoT devices by 2020. As innovative new technologies are introduced to address these challenges, conversations are rapidly shifting to the overarching challenge of expense.
Nearly every area of the mobile broadband ecosystem – component and device manufacturers, network equipment manufacturers, wireline and wireless service providers, applications developers and more – must introduce disruptive technologies to meet these challenges. They all collectively play a critical role in not only delivering essential new advances and capabilities (i.e. beam steering and tracking, millimeter wave radios, others), but also reducing the overall cost of networks, user equipment, and installation and maintenance processes.
Considering several experts believe today’s cost-of-test is already as much as 50% of the total mobile device cost, the additional outlay of test associated with new 5G deployments represents a significant barrier to the progress of 5G. New, lower cost, more efficient approaches to testing and validation must be introduced to economically transition 5G from the labs to commercial deployment.
Factors to consider
The 5G test hurdles are significant, driven by a few important factors:
Millimeter wave test equipment and component cost
Test solutions operating in the 28 GHz, 39 GHz and 70 GHz bands are inherently more expensive than those for 4G networks operating below 6 GHz.
Device/UE complexity
Next-generation devices must support both legacy 4G (LTE and wireless local area networks) as well as new 5G bands (28 GHz, 39 GHz and higher) and processes (beam steering, beam tracking, new waveforms and access technologies, etc.)
RAN intricacies
The introduction of advanced interference management, virtualization of network resources, and migration of complex network functionality from the core to the edge of the RAN will all result in a far more complex and potentially more expensive radio access network.
We all have our work cut out for us. As Grob went on to say at MWC, “We can give the consumer 1,000 times more bits, we can’t charge them 1,000 times more.” Similarly, the cost of 5G test cannot be 1,000, 100 or even 10 times the expenditure of 4G if operators are to have a chance at delivering on their promises of exponentially better 5G performance for the same price as 4G.
Larry Davis, national sales manager for Anritsu Company, has more than 25 years’ experience in the RF and microwave industry. He earned a BSETE degree in Computer Engineering from California State Polytechnic University-Pomona and a MS in Engineering Management and Leadership from Santa Clara University.
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