On October 10th, Ericsson 5G Global Roadshow officially departed from Beijing. At the launching ceremony, Zhang Zhiwei, chief marketing officer of Ericsson's Northeast Asia region, told reporters in an interview that the 5G Global Roadshow was different from last year (2017).
Last year, it was mainly for technical demonstrations. This time, it was to show that Ericsson has already walked on the road for 5G commercial-use market. 'Now we have a lot of things to do, to build a 5G network, and achieve 5G commercial success.' Zhang Zhiwei said.
5G is accelerating its global deployment
According to statistics, 5G is currently accelerating globally, with 154 operators planning to invest in 5G technology in 66 countries, including demonstrations, laboratory tests and field trials.
The fastest progress at this stage is the United States. US operator Verizon has launched a 5G-based FWA fixed wireless broadband access service to some part areas of domestic four cities
on October 1, 2018.
China is expected to offer pre-commercial or trial commercial 5G services in 2019 and will enter large-scaled commercial phase in 2020. South Korea may release 5G commercial or small-scale commercial applications
by the end of 2018, and will be commercialized on a larger scale in early 2019. Japan originally planned to launch 5G in the 2020 Olympic Games, and now plans to implement pre-commercial use by advancing time to 2019.
Zhang Zhiwei told reporters that many operators around the world are now adjusting the timetable for 5G commercial use adead.
China will naturally not fall behind. The trial commercialization in 2019 should be without a doubt, and eventually enters the commercial stage in 2020.
North America, Northeast Asia and Western Europe become the strongest market of 5G
According to the traffic report released by Ericsson on June, 2018, the three most powerful markets for 5G development will be North America, Northeast Asia and Western Europe. The North American pace is the fastest, because North American operators have found the entry point for 5G commercial, namely FWA fixed wireless broadband access. Ericsson is the partner of the project, providing the solutions for commercial deployment for the operators.
Zhang Zhiwei told reporters that the United States has its unique background in the first step into 5G commercial use. Unlike China, there exists not a small gap in the coverage of home broadband in the United States. Many families are looking forward to getting faster broadband access services, and the market potential is great. However, if fiber access is used, operators need to bear very high deployment costs, and the emerging 5G technology provides a very good solution for this. By replacing the traditional optical fiber, 5G signal switching to wifi in the home can quickly solve the problem of high-speed broadband access to households in many places. This is the reason why US operators adopted FWA as the first entry point for 5G services.
'The US operator has identified a 5G demand point and an application scenario, so it is determined to quickly promote 5G commercial use.' Zhang Zhiwei said, 'this also shows that 5G is an application-driven technology upgrade, if without being driven by suitable business, 5G can not developed.'
Europe also attaches great importance to 5G. At present, Sweden Telecom, Deutsche Telekom, Telecom Italia and Swiss Telecom are all striving to provide 5G services in Europe as early as possible, hoping that 5G will bring a greater source of income. Zhang Zhiwei said that relatively speaking, European operators are more concerned about the application of 5G in the industrial field.
'The status of China, Japan and Korea in Asia is very close. Operators and governments are actively promoting 5G testing and research. In 2019, 5G pre-commercial will be realized. 'China's business schedule is a bit slower, but it will definitely catch up quickly.' Zhang Zhiwei said, 'The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology is organizing tests intensively and will complete the three-stage test by the end of this year.'
Since it takes time to deploy a 5G network, 4G will still play an important role in the long term from the perspective of the number of users and traffic. Zhang Zhiwei said that it is difference from relationship between 4G and 3G, there is more complementary relationship between 5G and 4G. That 5G needs to develop rapidly does not need to turn all 4G users into 5G users. In fact, 5G can find its own growth space from some new application areas, such as Industrial Internet.
'2G, 3G and 4G mainly focus on solving people's communication needs, and 5G covers the standards for human and material at the first time, so it has its own unique development track.' Zhang Zhiwei said, 'People are looking forward to 5G, bringing changes to various walks of life, speeding up again and again.'
To find the direction of 5G landing
At present, Ericsson has won seven 5G commercial contracts worldwide, and maintains the leading position in the global 5G network commercial progress. At the same time, Ericsson is also conducting 5G testing allying with nearly 40 operators worldwide, including three operators (China Mobile, China Telecom, China Unicom) in China.
Ericsson has always believed that the success of 5G not only depends on the superiority and inferiority of technology, but also on whether it can find good 5G use cases or not. Without good use cases, it is difficult for the telecommunications industry to widely accept 5G. To this end, Ericsson has invested lots of energy and resources to jointly explore 5G application scenarios and use cases by allying with enterprises and scientific research institutions in various fields. At present, Ericsson is working with 22 industrial partners, 45 universities and research institutes to explore 5G use cases in different fields.
Zhang Zhiwei told reporters that 5G's attractive aspect is to effectively promote the growth of digital economy. It is predicted that the global ICT (Information and Communication Technology) digitization revenue will reach more than 3 trillion US dollars in 2026, of which 38%, namely $1.3 trillion will be generated by 5G, and operators are expected to get 47% of this revenue, namely 619 billion US dollars. However, Zhang Zhiwei stressed that this 619 billion US dollars will not neccessarily fall into the hands of operators. If they only operate network services as they do now, operators can only get one-third of them, that is $204 billion; only through transformation, extending to the upstream of the value chain, from network providers to platform enablers, application creators, operators can get the rest of the more than 400 billion in their hands.
Ericsson has analyzed more than 200 industry application cases and found that there are ten major industries that will get the most benefit from 5G. To this end, Ericsson has made a special report to help operators find the direction of 5G landing. However, after finding the right direction, it is directly facing the problem of how to achieve specific landing. After realizing this problem, Ericsson re-organized these 200 cases and the top ten industries to form nine use case groups, which can help operators obtain clearer development ideas. 'Ericsson has been always advocating the guidance for the construction of the network from the aspect of of 5G applications and use cases . For this reason, Ericsson also proposed a methodology, that is, the commercial potential of 5G, operators can find applications and determine 5G network construction and investment strategies.' Zhang Wei says.
For example, Zhang Zhiwei said that the wheels and blades of the jet engine of MTUAeroEngines are milled from solid metal sheets. The production process requires extremely high precision and surface integrity. The milling process takes about 15-20 hours and plus the process of coating and quality inspection, the entire production cycle lasts for 3-4 months. Ericsson has partnered with the Fraunhofer Institute of Production Technology in Germany to develop 5G use cases for this production process. It has been proven that the new 5G-based production technology can effectively increase production efficiency and can help a roulette processing plant to save about 27 million Euros in cost, and all plants in the world can save a total cost of 360 million Euros. 'From a sustainable perspective, the use of 5G in the total production for leaf discs and its use in jet engines will reduce CO2 emissions by about 16 million tons per year.' said Zhang Zhiwei.
In another case, on July 24, 2018, Ericsson teamed up with NTTDocomo and AGC to showcase 5G communications at speeds of up to 8 Gbps on vehicles with a speed of about 100 kilometers per hour, creating a new global record. The car window antenna used in this demonstration was developed by Japanese glass manufacturer AGC and supports the 5GHz band of 28GHz. Installing the window antenna does not have any negative impact on the vehicle design and is almost invisible from the outside. This test has taken another big step in the integration of 5G technology and industrial products.
Finally, Zhang Zhiwei said that after years of hard work, Ericsson has taken the lead in 5G commercialization road. In the next two or three years, 5G commercialization will be rapidly spread around the world. Ericsson will work with operators and industry partners to actively explore the global 5G commercial success.
