By Ben Cardwell, President of North America, Vecta Labs
I had the pleasure of attending Mobile World Congress USA in Las Vegas at the end of September. It was terrific to see the mobile industry back meeting face-to-face for the first time since the start of the pandemic. I found it a little ironic that we were all there together recapping the huge successes of the primary industry that had kept mankind communicating seamlessly when we couldn’t be together.
The core theme from this year’s MWC was Connectivity Unleashed.
With close to one billion 5G subscribers on-air, our industry should be very proud. The Vecta Labs team has been highly engaged with mobile network operators and their manufacturers as the expansive 5G networks have been built and optimized. The complexity of the mobile network is at an all-time high, and this complexity will continue to grow as new frequencies, applications, and devices are introduced.
As such, our team remains busy researching and studying opportunities and drivers for 5G. Having the chance to engage with cellular network operators, mobile developers, and the broader industry to better understand what’s next on the 5G horizon was highly valuable. I listened intently.
Do you remember the three foundational 5G use cases defined by 3GPP?
Well, it struck me that after all the hype and lots of progress made so far, the only use case that has been truly realized at scale is Enhanced Mobile Broadband (eMBB), and one could argue that the main-stream consumer may not even notice an improvement over the performance they had with LTE.
And, to date the proof points around Ultra Reliable Low Latency Communication (URLLC) or Massive Machine Type Communications (mMTC) are few.
I realize my viewpoint may be a bit controversial.
But the deeper I dig into understanding the benefits of 5G, the more I recognize that the industry is largely still struggling to pin down the differentiated use cases that benefit consumers and enterprises enough for them to open their wallets.
While I continue to search for the ‘why’, the opportunity still lies in front of us to fully realize 5G’s promise to unlock new transformationaluse cases for consumers and enterprises, and to dramatically lower the operators cost/bit/Hz of delivery.
For those of us who are involved in designing, deploying, optimizing, and maintaining these complex networks, we hold the specific challenge to make the networks better.
These highly complex networks were deployed quickly and expansively, and they are generally noisy. Noise is caused by interference, and in a spread-spectrum network such as 5G this directly translates to capacity loss, suboptimal throughput, and sub-par latency performance.
Though interference can stem from a litany of causes, the largest factors, in my observation, is build quality and consistency. We can do better in the areas of site design standardization, education of engineers and technicians, site hygiene, training of build crews, and systematic testing.
Vecta Labs is focused on these issues as part of our obsession to improve network performance.
While this might not sound overly exciting, improving network performance is a fundamental ingredient to the formula that will progressively lead in the pursuit of Connectivity Unleashed.
As the massive 5G ecosystem continues to understand and build out rich use cases that enrich the lives of consumers and fuel enterprises to thrive, we at Vecta Labs are eager to contribute real solutions and engage as an essential partner.
If you’re keen to learn more about the work we are doing, please get in touch via contact@vectalabs.com today.
At Vecta Labs, we’ve been doing our own research and delving deep into the power of 5G – in fact, we’ve recently published a series of articles via our “Out Of The Noise” platforms, which focus on the potential and opportunity 5G creates for technology today.
See links to our “5G Killer Apps” series below:
Part 1 – The Killer Apps for 5G: https://vectalabs.com/news/what-are-the-killer-apps-for-5g-part-1/
Part 2 – Cellular Vehicle to Everything: https://vectalabs.com/news/out-of-the-noise-killer-apps-part-2-cellular-vehicle-to-everything-c-v2x/
Part 3 – Extended Reality: https://vectalabs.com/news/out-of-the-noise-killer-apps-part-3-extended-reality/