M. Beraud on the future of 5G
06TH January 2020
M. Jacques Beraud is the President of Italtel France, a company specialised in Telecommunication solutions and in the Digital Transformation of enterprises. He has over 20 years of experience in the telecommunications industry. When asked about the arrival of 5G and its impact on the Telecommunications industry, M. Beraud said the following:
“The arrival of 5G will be a major change in the Telco industry, although the first impact will be different for each country as for instance the value of FWA (Fixed Wireless Access) is different in each place.
In France, the first application of 5G is especially valued in the context of B2B where real-time applications are keys, like for the 4.0 industry and IoT or for autonomous vehicles, and in the B2C and gaming industries, where speed is also a priority. There are many other applications for 5G, using Mobile Edge Computing, where the information is processed and distributed locally instead of going all the way to the main servers or Data Centers and coming back.
In terms of infrastructure, 5G is based on a very large IP network that goes from the enterprises to the edge and to the antenna. Thus, it is dependent on a network of cell towers, IP, and fiber optic cables that will need to deal with the demand for this new technology. 5G can be deployed in Standalone or non-standalone, but at the moment, the most convenient way of deploying 5G is by using the 4G core and opting for a gradual deployment. This will mean that the transition 4G to 5G won’t be as rough as the change from 3G to 4G, where the whole network had to be revamped before the technology could be upgraded.
Some estimates predict the complete deployment of 5G to start by the end of 2020, early 2021, in the UK and certain other countries, while France will be most certainly later. From 2022-2023 in France, 5G will allow several groups of users to share the same network despite very different usages (“Slicing”), thus allowing strong enhancements of the various verticals.”
