Ex-NCC chairman calls for Africa’s involvement in 5G plans

World telecommunications experts, including, former acting executive vice chairman, Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC), Dr. Bashir Gwandu, gathered in Copenhagen, Denmark last week, to map out the development pathway for fifth generation (5G) mobile communications technology, which proposes a total connected day-to-day life.

The two-day conference, which was organised by Wireless World Research Forum, provided a platform to discuss global standardisation, global co-operation and interoperability, looking at how a user-centric approach can be used to identify and overcome the obstacles and challenges connected to a 5G future.

Among the key speakers at the conference was Dr. Gwandu, who made presentation and called for the inclusion of Africa in the practical research tests on 5G as way of taking into consideration the peculiarities of the continent especially as leading mobile growth region.

Presentations was made by a number of industry leaders and experts, and specific sessions for this year’s event included:  Building a globally agreed vision for 5G development and deployment; creating the 5G architecture, overcoming the obstacles to 5G deployment; revolutionary new use cases and implications for industry; New business models and commercial opportunities across different sectors (using the automotive industry as a sector case study).


Some of the features expected of the 5G as raised in the conference include very low sub-millisecond round-trip latency (delay) of 5G signal, better security to avoid hacking, better location identification, ultra-broadband speed of over 10Gbps, distributed content and processing.
 
Others are much better coverage and availability, low power consumption, high-order Mimo antenna systems, use of sub-6GHz or the spectrum between 6GHz and 100GHz, and whether or not the network should evolve from the 4G-LTE or simply new type of network, among others. Projected applications include machine to machine to people communications, autonomous cars and robots, and super wireless cloud computing, among others.

Today’s, 5G has already been tested in Japan by Huawei and NTT DOCOMO using sub-6GHz bands and in a public place, unlike previous experiments, which are usually conducted in a lab. The carrier managed to reach peak speeds of 3.6 Gbps where as the fastest average 4G LTE speeds come from Spain at 18 Mbps.