During the FIFA World Cup, on the days when matches are played in Kazan, one can get a ride there along Kazanka river in a pilotless electric bus. KAMAZ-1221, a 12 seater, is taking anyone on board. These days it only travels 650 meters over a restricted area at 10 kmh, yet the UGV designers claim the next prototype will be smart. The electric vehicle employs a digital map and is aware where a stop is to be made. Its operation is monitored by hundreds of internal and external sensors which feed their signals to a server center. The telemetric data is transmitted via a 5G network installed by Megafon telecommunications provider. This is one of a multitude of impressive pilot projects which market leaders launch one by one these days. That is done not for publicity purposes only. True, only some elements of 5G networks are no available. Building a full-fledged network will require overcoming problems with technologies and regulations. Yet there are plenty of business scenarios for the mobile communication’s new format and hence ultimate users, microelectronics manufacturers and satellite communication operators all tend to strive for different technologies aiming to launch their large scale implementation by 2020.
Starting with games
Space strike aircraft pilots fight Artificial Intelligence which broke out of a human control. Yet the fighters are only equipped with virtual reality helmets and joysticks and are located in a temporal pavilion erected at Startup Village in Skolkovo nearby Moscow. The show is one of the first real time presentations of the 5G cybersporting pilot project implemented by Intel, Ericsson and МТS.
Two players physically located 20 meters away from each other, interacted via a base Ericsson station and an Intel mobile terminal. A delay would not accede 4 milliseconds. The signal transmission speed ensured by employing a broader band and a new radio interface, is one of the 5G’s main advantages. Such speeds are impossible to ensure in LTE.
Gaming was the first experimental area and in that scenario as is not hard to demonstrate the advantages since the image does not freeze.
“In a game, a slight time delay is a mere inconvenience. But when performing a telemedical surgery or operating a motor vehicle remotely, a minor delay can have a vital significance”, Ericsson representative at the pavilion said.
The volume of the data transmitted via the communication channel is also of importance.
“In this game case, we use a 400 MHz band which is 20 times greater than LTE can ensure. The network is capable of pumping huge data volumes. At the moment though we use a 28 GHz band. It is characterized by a strong attenuation. That means, a device must operate within the sight line. Yet the problem is solvable”, Ericsson representative explained.
Generally speaking, the designers have got an understanding of the ways to build the new format network at the initial stage. For some while it will be developed as a non stand alone model based on an LTE network. It will also get the signaling traffic, while the user traffic may be going via the 5G network.
Digitally innovated museum antiques
The market is attentively eyeing the technology and analyzes the possible scenarios. Still, at the moment 5G is the area of the major players’ interest. At the recent St Petersburg International Economic Forum the three mobile communication majors and Rostelecom all announced some 5G pilot projects. Rostelecom, for instance, presented at the Winter Palace a project of a remote restoration of pieces of art when a remotely located robot is carefully repeating all manipulations by a specialist broadcast at a 5G channel.
According to Alexei Sechkin, director of VAS products and services development for telecom operators at Jet Infosystems, the technology has an interesting potential for primarily IoT and wireless broadband access:
“5G opens up such opportunities as UGVs operation and use of an AI via cloud, as well as replacing the last miles and local networks (LAN, WLAN) in general with a mobile network. The general trend is, IoT will result in mobilization of various devices. It should be noted the eSIM technology is being developed concurrently. It will allow abandoning physical SIM cards and stimulate further IoT market growth”.
Still, pilot projects becoming commonplace practices should not be expected shortly.
“Our forecasts coincide with the opinions of the majority of the market players. So the broad exploitation will start after 2020”, Natalia Galyan, regional director of Intel in Russia, says. “The new technology requires an overhaul of the entire infrastructure, and a reengineering of everything ranging from the data processing centers to the ultimate devices (smartphones, tablets, or notebooks) modernization. At the same time, there should appear the devices which need that traffic, such as autonomous vehicles. An explosive development in one area only is impossible. So if, for example, in three years there are smartphones in the market which have 5G, they will still have to use the infrastructure currently available, i.e. 3G and 4G at best, whereas 200 kilometers away from Moscow that can still be H”.
Alexei Sechkin is certain that due to the uneasy present-day economic situation, the 5G implementation in Russia will take place later than in the US and Europe. Still, such standards as Open RAN can ease the financial burden through distributing costs among all operators.
“Open RAN concept implies virtualizing BBU (BatteryBackupUnit) and a sharing possibility. That can stimulate further development of companies’ infrastructure”, he believes. “Several operators will be able to share not just physical space and electricity for base stations, but the stations themselves”.
Ministry of Communications has drafted a digital economy development program. It envisages launching publicly available 5G networks in major Russian cities in 2020. In Moscow, local authorities have made a contract with Megafon to launch a pilot network in the third quarter of 2019. Its commercial exploitation is expected to start in 2022.
By Anna Oreshkina
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