Broadcast
The 5G communications network promises instantaneous, highly personalised, ultraresolution video - and the technology is closer than you think.
As a ski jumper begins the vertiginous descent to win a medal, spectators can see, on their smartphone, exactly what the competitor sees thanks to the camera on the skier’s helmet.
Sports fans could then switch to experience the rollercoaster ride of a skeleton athlete, also live and without delay – and with pictures 16 times the resolution of HD.
This is the likely scenario sketched out for the 2018 Winter Olympics in South Korea, just one application of the next generation in mobile connectivity, 5G, which promises massive increases in bandwidth for video delivered with imperceptible latency.
“If 4G, 3G and 2G were, generally speaking, about speed improvements and providing mobile data for the first time, 5G will expand what digital communications can do in almost every direction, and beyond recognition of what exists today,” says Nokia’s head of innovation marketing, Volker Held.
“The promise of 5G is fantastic – huge capacity, available everywhere, at low cost,” adds David Wood, deputy director of EBU Technology and Development and chair of the World Broadcasting Unions’ Technical Committee. “It could precipitate social change on the scale of the web itself.”
The broad outlines for 5G have been agreed by organisations like EU 5G PPP (Public Private Partnership), initiated by the European Commission with manufacturers, telcos, service providers and researchers.
The specifications include: regular mobile data speeds surpassing 1 gigabits per second (Gbps), peaks of 10Gbps (some telcos claim 50Gbps), and a latency of less than 1 millisecond, far outstripping the 100Mbps speeds of the best 4G LTE networks.
Breaking bandwidth barriers
With video forecast to account for 80% of all mobile traffic by 2021 (from 64% today, states Ericsson), there is a pressing need to alleviate bottlenecks.
“At a certain point, the existing 4G LTE technology will not be sustainable to cope with the massive growth in video data,” says Held. “We need a new structure. This, for me, is the kernel of the 5G business case. Utilising it means we won’t need to talk about bandwidth constraints for the foreseeable future.”
The system would permit downloads of a 4K feature in a few seconds rather than the 10 minutes it takes today by 4G, or nearly three hours over a 3G service.
“Bandwidth is not limitless, but 5G will feel like it’s limitless to the user,” says George Robertson, chief technologist at DTG. “You will always have more than you need.”
Next year, US operator Verizon plans to roll out the first commercial 5G network. A clutch of European telcos, including BT, Deutsche Telekom, Ericsson, Nokia, Telefonica and Vodafone, say they will begin conducting large-scale tests by 2018, with a launch in at least one city in each EU country by 2020.
Ericsson says it is “overrun” with requests for public demonstrations of the technology. 5G will be featured at the 2018 Fifa World Cup in Russia, the 2018 Glasgow-Berlin European Athletics Championships and Uefa Euros 2020.
At its most prosaic, 5G will allow operators to deliver video services in “much better quality and consistency, much more cost-efficiently”, explains Giles Wilson, TV and media chief technology officer at Ericsson. “It will improve the economics of video delivery.”
Services could be highly personalised. “Viewers will be able to choose multiple camera angles and select scenes to replay without any noticeable delay,” says Held.
There may be little value in viewing 4K, let alone 8K, pictures on small, mobile screens, but 5G could deliver these high resolutions over broadband to wireless terminals and TVs in the home. Another route is to combine fibre delivery into the home with 5G capable wi-fi transmitters around the home.
“If it all comes true, you don’t need a broadcast network any more; you can do it all over 5G,” says Peter Siebert, executive director, DVB.
Similarly, 5G is an enabler for bandwidth- hungry virtual reality to mobile devices. Nokia and Intel demonstrated several 360-degree videos running simultaneously on testbed 5G platforms at Mobile World Congress (MWC) in February.
“It may be that future ‘broadcaster’ services will be a package of elements that include a linear programme and some other connected content, such as a VR short or some AR elements,” suggests Wood. “The idea of object-based broadcasting is also interesting – broadcasting the programme in bits, so the user can personalise components of the programme.”
Taking this a stage further, real-time holographic video is anticipated by Ofcom, not an organisation known for hyperbole. Several companies demonstrated holography at MWC, including South Korea’s SK Telecom, which displayed images such as a dolphin inside a beam of green light.
Nokia’s Held says there is considerable interest in Asia. “Technically, all that is required is a huge leap in bandwidth,” he says, predicting holographic video deployments from 2020.
Broadcast and media is far from the only sector eyeing 5G as a potential gamechanger.
More profoundly, the technology is expected to allow the growing number of sensors to communicate with one another. Intel expects this number to hit 50 billion by 2020.
“It’s about connecting every machine to every machine, not just smartphones,” says Held. “That’s what makes 5G arguably more exciting and more impactful than any wireless technology ever introduced. 5G will not only make consumer broadband services much better, but will drive the digitisation of basically every industry, from healthcare to manufacturing.”
5G on the horizon
Applied to the automotive sector, 5G opens up the car as a mobile venue for consumption of programming.
“The difference in latency for live broadcast streams to mobiles from 0.5s to 0.001s will have a positive impact, but perhaps not as much as expected,” notes Tony Maroulis, research manager, Ampere Analysis.
“The difference is more likely noticeable in moving vehicles, with expectations that it will work at high speeds, where current mobile networks struggle to maintain a connection.”
Operators have barely finalised 4G LTE rollouts and, in some parts of the world, 3G is still bedding down as a commercial proposition. Nonetheless, 5G is growing closer.
“The highest barriers are less technical and more in the scale of the necessary changes to policy and infrastructures, economic climates,” says Wood.
Net neutrality, the principle that internet service providers should enable access to all content and applications regardless of the source, is one sticking point. Telcos want some assurance of a return on investment, a point made to Europe’s governments in a widely backed 5G Manifesto published last month.
There is also scepticism of some of the ambitious claims. “There are many upcoming projects labelled 5G that are just marketing,” says Siebert.
He notes that 4G, specified in 2008, included provision for 1Gpbs. “We had the same pattern when 4G arrived. Operators claimed to have 4G tech but they were just using existing 3G at its best capacity.”
Siebert thinks a more accurate timeframe for 5G rollout is 10-15 years. “There is always an over expectation of what the next technology can do – and in the end we are hit by the reality of what can be delivered at a reasonable price,” he says.
5G
stands for fifth generation and refers to the next mobile wireless
standard based on the IEEE 802.11ac standard of broadband technology.
World
standardisation body ITU is discussing 5G allocations and should
reach conclusions in 2019.
Advances
in maximising higher frequency electromagnetic waves enables 5G to
carry a huge data capacity. 5G trials have been conducted in bands
such as 15GHz, 28GHz, 60GHz and 70GHz. These frequencies are far in
excess of the spectrum occupied by today’s wireless broadband and
terrestrial TV broadcasting, so 5G is “out of harm’s way for
broadcasting”, according to David Wood, deputy director of EBU
technology and development.
5G
specifications are intended to conserve power, so much so that mobile
devices with a 10- year battery life are expected.
Among
the technical and business challenges is a denser transmitter
network, calculated as a base station every 150 metres, which will
require heavy investment by network operators.
“They
will need to gamble that they will be able to subsequently recoup the
costs from the public,” says Wood.
No comments:
Post a Comment