Qualcomm’s European VP of Technology challenged operators, infrastructure vendors and device makers to showcase 5G in commercial networks at specific speeds and latency.
Dino Flore has called on the industry to demonstrate: 5Gbps download speeds, 1Gbps upload speeds and under 10 milliseconds end-to-end latency.
He said hitting these targets is crucial to enabling transformative experiences and services, commenting, “We believe this challenge can be achieved by the mobile ecosystem this year.”
Three milestones
To meet the criteria, operators and their partners must demonstrate performance in all three milestones in commercial networks and using commercial devices. However, not all three benchmarks need to be achieved at the same time, nor in the same geography or device.
“The spirit of this challenge is also to demonstrate the adaptability of 5G to serve different deployment scenarios, services and devices,” Flore said.
3GPP speculated that we might see plans for the 5G Challenge outlined at this year’s Mobile World Congress. Flore was the former leader of 3GPP’s RAN group. Companies are being encouraged to share on Twitter when they meet the milestones, using the #5Gchallenge hashtag.
5G in 2019: What do you think?
Take our short annual survey into the most important trends and tech, in which 5G features heavily, along with AI and virtualisation. We’ll publish our research results in February – just in time to arm you for MWC.