Emerging 5G Mobile Technologies Seminar
The staff of MBNL a joint venture company owned by UK mobile network operators EE and Three attended a seminar organised by the company in Amersham. The aim of this seminar was to inform staff about new technologies emerging in the mobile market place. Guest speakers included Mika Uusitalo, Nokia CTO Europe and Peter Marshall, Ericsson UK.
Mika Uusitalo presented the theme “How the nature and volume of demand for mobile data services has changed and will continue to change in future”. This was a very interesting presentation focusing on mobile evolution and how the market adapted to changing demand over the years.
Nokia once dominated the mobile handset market and Mika explained why Nokia no longer has a mobile handset division. He warns the audience what happened to Nokia could happen to any mobile vendor or operator if you do not keep up with changing demand. This message came from experience as Nokia focused their efforts on their Symbian operating system; likes of Apple with their iOS system and Google with their Android system were changing the market place.
Mobile Applications (Apps) on these new operating systems allowed many software companies opportunities to develop new products that the consumers wanted and this revolutionised the mobile market place. Mika concluded with the emergence of 5G technologies new companies not in the mobile sphere today are looking at introducing new products and services that can again rock the market place.
Peter Marshall covered the theme “5G: what it will be, the concepts and capabilities that will enable it and how it will enhance the experience that customer’s receive”. This topic of discussion was produced in collaboration with King’s College London.
Peter has a wealth of knowledge and focused on what Ericsson is doing to develop new 5G services. The internet of things he explained must support billions of device connections via the mobile network. This requires new architectures in every functional block of the network from the way devices connect to the network to how calls are routed around the network. Vertical industries offering new services can come into play and operators may need to work with these service providers or simply end up managing these connections.
To summarise Peter said 2G enabled us to “Hear”, 3G and 4G enabled us to “See” but 5G can enable us to “Touch”. He explained the controller of a drone can make more refined flight adjustment if he could feel the wind resistance experienced by the drone on the joy stick controller.
The seminar concluded and all the staff left except for the Network Design, Planning and Deployment team who held a departmental meeting that is of confidential nature and therefore will remain un-disclosed.
MBNL has been a global benchmark for network sharing joint ventures since 2007 when mobile operators EE and Three UK signed a ground breaking network consolidation agreement.