Page 3 - Mobile World Daily - Day 3

NEWS
KT Telecom
eyes 2018
5G network;
Nokia aims
to be top 2
player
By Paul Rasmussen
Visitors to the 2018 Winter
Olympics in Korea will have
access to commercial 5G
services, according to KT Telecom
CEO Chang-Gyu Hwang (pictured),
speaking at Tuesday’s opening
keynote session.
Undaunted by the lack of
worldwide standards, Hwang said that
the company was moving ahead
rapidly with 5G. “It’s the next-
generation network we need. Speed is
only one part of the requirement, the
biggest is capacity. We need to build a
network that’ll be able to deliver real- five-inch 1280 x 720 touch screen and
time data with very low latency.”
One clear reason for KT Telecom’s
interest in pushing ahead with 5G is
Hwang’s assertion that the network
costs will be significantly lower.
“Computing costs have fallen
1000-fold since their inception.
We’ve achieved this change with
semiconductors, we now have to do
the same with 5G compared to 2G,”
he added.
KT Telecom’s aggressive ambitions
were watered down by Nokia
Networks’ CEO Rajeev Suri. “The
2018 Winter Olympics 5G service will
be a trial network. We won’t see
commercial services until 2020.”
“But, Korea could be first with
5G, followed by Japan and then the
US. However, Europe could
leapfrog all of these,” he added.
Of note, Suri confidently asserted
that the supply of 5G network
equipment would come from a
small selection of vendors. “It’ll be
a three-horse race: Ericsson,
Huawei and Nokia Networks.”
“To stay in this race to develop
and deliver 5G equipment you need
market share and the revenues to
carry through with the required
long-term R&D investment. And I
don’t intend to be third in this race.”
Suri remains convinced that Nokia
Networks’ approach of programmable
networks will be significant to 5G. “It
will offer huge flexibility while
providing rock-solid reliability.”
MOBILE WORLD CONGRESS DAILY 2015 | www.mobileworldcongress.com
BlackBerry unveils
Leap smartphone;
continues shift to
software
By Joanne Taaffe
BlackBerry had billed “a very
strong device roadmap” in the
buildup to its Mobile World
Congress presence this year. What
the company showed at its press
conference yesterday was a full-touch
screen smartphone, called Leap.
BlackBerry’s CEO John Chen
also promised a curved-screen
handset with a separate keyboard
to come out “as soon as it’s done.”
In addition, the company stressed
the integration of its software into
Samsung's KNOX workspace.
The Leap smartphone comes with a
no keyboard and will cost $275. But
the latest BlackBerry handset “will find and software to be twin towers”.
it tough to compete with the iPhone
and Android devices,” according to
analyst house CCS Insight. However,
the research company added that “the
Leap will be essential to a more-
rounded portfolio.”
In the meantime BlackBerry
made it clear it remains heavily
focused on developing cross-
platform software services that
Huawei and Qualcomm
differ on 5G
By Paul Rasmussen
Technology vendors
disagreed over the
timescales
for 5G
deployments at Tuesday’s keynote.
Qualcomm’s CEO Steve
Mollenkopf (pictured far right) called
for the benefits of LTE to be fully
maximised to protect R&D and
deployment investment, whereas
Ken Hu (pictured right), Huawei’s
rotating CEO, stressed the benefits
of 5G over today’s LTE.
“The debate is when do we call it
5G,” said Mollenkopf. “There’s still
a lot to do.”
“The biggest challenge we face
with 5G is the extreme number of
use cases. There will be many new
methods for billions of devices to
connect and interact, and we need
to transform the edge of the internet
to better support mobile devices. It’s
at the edge that real innovation will
take place,” he added.
However, he warned that there was
an ongoing need for multimode
support to protect existing and future
Chen said will extend to “any end
point” – i.e any IP address –
“whether it is a vending machine or
a rice cooker”. In addition to
developing a software platform to
address the internet of things
market, BlackBerry is aiming its
enterprise mobility software at the
vertical sectors of healthcare,
finance and government.
“We’re expanding into the
software and services business and
doing it quickly,” said Ketan
Kamdar, global head of device
portfolio, BlackBerry.
Hardware still accounts for the
majority of BlackBerry’s revenues,
according to Chen, who admits “it
will take some time for hardware
In its effort to build up software
revenues quickly BlackBerry is
working with any operating system,
whether it is Windows, Android or iOS.
In particular, BlackBerry underscored
its collaboration with Samsung to
“create a highly integrated
experience” for BlackBerry’s
enterprise software on Samsung
KNOX. The strategy of putting
LTE investment, and “we don’t
need to make a huge technology
jump when LTE is providing some
of this already.”
Hu countered this viewpoint with
the claim that LTE cannot support
the 1,000s of connections needed
for IoT services. “5G will be capable
of connecting 100 billion devices,
BlackBerry’s enterprise software and
encrypted messaging functions onto
Samsung phones could call into
question the future of BlackBerry
handsets. However, for now
BlackBerry claims to be committed to
continuing to develop handsets aimed
at the enterprise market.
BlackBerry’s enterprise software
services include secure access, and
a split billing function that lets
companies pay only for work-
related voice, data and SMS usage.
The company, which cites
operators as its key channel, also
showed collaboration tools, such as
one-touch conference call dial that
does away with the need to enter
passwords.
which will be very valuable for
industrial applications.”
The Huawei executive noted that
only 5G latency capabilities could
fulfil the much-hyped driverless car
concept. “Stopping a car travelling at
100kph would extend braking
distance by another 1.4 meters due to
LTE latency, but only 2.8cm with 5G.”
Wednesday 4th March PAGE 3
NEWS IN BRIEF...
M2M alliance
leads to battery-
life uplift
Teclo Networks and Stream
Technologies have announced
a tie-up to improve the
performance of M2M network
performance, including a
significant increasing battery-
life cycles. The pair have used
Stream Technologies' S-
Series solution to achieve
faster data transfer times
between connected devices,
this means such devices use
less power when they
‘communicate’ with one
another.
Ams turns down
noise on Huawei
smartphone
Ams, a provider of high-
performance analog ICs and
sensors, announced that the
headset of Huawei’s Ascend
Mate 7 smartphone uses low-
power noise cancellation,
courtesy of its ANC (active
noise cancellation) chip. The
firm said the ANC feature,
combined with passive noise
reduction provided by in-ear
housings, creates a near-
silent background even in
noisy environments.
Spirent adds
testing to Wi-Fi
access points
Spirent has launched
software to test service
performance from the core
network and Wi-Fi offload
gateways, through to access
points. The solution is in
response to growing cellular
network traffic offload onto
Wi-fi networks by operators.
“5G provides us with a very
powerful applications platform that
will take the technology into new
industry segments and trigger
positive disruption. But we must
involve the key industry verticals in
how 5G evolves. The
communications industry did this in
isolation in the past, which resulted
in a fragmented approach.”
As an indication of Huawei’s
keenness to move forward, the
company confirmed it had already
developed a new air interface for
5G. Hu added that 5G would have
a virtualised architecture leading
to a single physical network
providing support for a multitude
of different apps.
Mollenkopf, meanwhile, indicated
that the concept of 5G was still very
much under discussion, emphasising
Qualcomm’s views that this next-
generation technology must target
user-centric connectivity. “It’s
important that the mobile user is
seen as part of the network, a node.”