A clash of opinions among 5G factions at CommunicAsia2015 demonstrated that the future of 5G standards - let alone what 5G itself means - is still up in the air, one week before a major ITU standardization meeting is due to take place.
Representatives from the ITU-R, the 5G Forum, the Fifth Generation Mobile Communications Promotion Forum, and the 5G World Alliance agreed to disagree on what aspects should even be in the KPIs for 5G, though all broadly agreed that it’s more about M2M rather than increased speeds.
The ITU’s 5G working group plans to finalize standards in their meeting in San Diego next week. Colin Langtry, chief of study group at ITU-R, said that the point is to enable ultra-reliable communications and low latency, among other factors.
Youngnam Han from the Korea 5G Forum called for three KPIs to be added to the ITU-R measurements. For instance, the handling of interruption time isn’t currently measured in the proposed ITU-R working group.
Hiroyuki Morikawa from the Fifth Generation Mobile Communications Promotion Forum generally agreed with his Korean counterpart but urged more debate about scheduling the various milestones in the ITU plan.
Langtry said that there may be co-opetition between the various 5G groups, but assured everyone that this would ensure a good result.
Han said that Korea and Japan are now the largest countries in terms of handset development, while the United States and Europe are welcome to engage in the debate. Langtry said they were there, just not leading the debate.
Latif Ladid, chair of the 5G World alliance, focused on the need to mandate IPv6 for 5G in order to enable the Internet of Things.
Ladid - also founder and chair of the IPv6 Forum - said that individuals will soon need not a single IP address, but millions. NAT is a big handicap. The IoT will need to be always on, always secure, and always scalable - not the case today.
He lamented that the mobile world had ignored his advice and rolled out NAT instead of going with IPv6 in 3G and partially in the 4G space.
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