5G – Pathway to the Future

At Ericsson we’re making some very positive steps forward in 5G in Europe and Latin America. Today we announced a fantastic milestone - the first live pre-standard 5G test in the UK, with our partners Vodafone UK and King’s College London. No one in the UK has shown pre-standard 5G working independently of existing 4G network technologies - until now.

In December we also announced the exciting news that we will modernize Deutsche Telekom’s mobile network with 5G-ready multi-standard solutions, to offer subscribers improved network performance. Last month we filed our landmark 5G patent application, which lays the foundation for all future mobile networks by incorporating numerous Ericsson inventions into a complete architecture for the 5G network standard. The patent application, which combines the work of 130 Ericsson inventors, is the largest in cellular communications in terms of number of inventors, anywhere in the world.

In November, we also signed our first contract for complete digital transformation and network evolution to 5G in the world with Swisscom. This is a really interesting development and just the beginning of 5G reality now. It’s also been great to collaborate with RCS & RDS for the first time to launch enhanced mobile broadband services and bring 5G and the IoT closer to Digi’s subscribers in Romania. It’s a fantastic win, where we have swapped out the existing vendor to prepare RCS & RDS’ network as it evolves to 5G. We also announced our strategic partnership with Entel to prepare its network for 5G by deploying our latest LTE FDD network technologies and LTE TDD Massive MIMO.

As the race to bring ultrafast wireless technology to the market intensifies, it will be even more important for the industry to increase business readiness for 5G. The most significant part of the 5G discussion is use cases and the focus needs to be on what can be done with it, and how to monetize such use cases. That helps us make sure we are developing the right technology for real-world applications and gives us the experience to help our customers understand what can be done with the technology to accelerate innovation.

I can’t wait to see the next 5G developments in 2018. Happy holidays and see you in the new year!