MWC 2018: NEC say 5G will offer ‘A Future Beyond Imagining’

NEC Australia have demonstrated new biometric, 5G and AI-driven technologies that are expected to be incorporated into the company’s existing Smart Cities initiative at this year’s Mobile World Congress.

The company also announced that it will be undertaking several 5G verification experiments alongside NTT DOCOMO 5G wireless technologies in the coming months.

Speaking to PC World Australia, General Manager of Research and Development at NEC Australia Gordon Gay says that the biggest change in the telecoms business that 5G will bring “one of the big changes is going to be the network itself.”

“In terms of the telcos, there’s going to be a couple of different components. Obviously the higher speed, users want to access it to do things - to be frank - we don’t know yet. In fact,  our theme around the Mobile World Congress is that [5G] is ‘A Future Beyond Imagination’. Because the speeds are going up and the actual practical uses we don’t fully understand” he says.

“The other thing is really around the efficiency of the network to support applications like IoT. I think that’ll probably be where - in particular - the telcos are looking because that’s a steady data model and obviously from a revenue point of view, it’s something that’s easier to unpack.”

“Some of it’s already coming in LTE, which is coming up now, but you’ll see more and more of these connections using 5G to communicate maybe low-latency comms and larger-bandwidth comms”

He says that “the ability to work without a network will also be in the device as well. You can communicate device to device.”

Gay suggests using an airborne drone as a network hub as an example.

“From an operator point of view, it generates more revenue because there are more ways for devices to talk to one another,” he says.

For a longer look at everything that happened at this year's Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, click here.

Disclosure - Our coverage of MWC 2018 was sponsored by Intel who covered the cost of our flights and accommodation.