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EU pins hopes on 5G

By Reuters
Brussels/Barcelona, 04 Mar 2015

The European Union (EU) is looking to sign agreements with China, Japan and the US to co-operate on developing the next generation of mobile broadband as it seeks to help its companies catch up in the race to develop such technologies.

Europe, a leader in the 1990s in the second-generation GSM (2G) technology standard for mobile phone networks moving into the digital era, has fallen behind the United States, Japan and South Korea in the deployment of the latest 4G standard for mobile broadband services.

The region's network operators, including Britain's Vodafone and Spain's Telefonica, were slower to move to 4G than Japan, Korea and the United States, and adoption in Europe remains lower compared to other advanced economies.

European policymakers are now trying not to repeat the mistakes of the past and are seeking to be at the forefront of developing the standards for 5G, which promises much faster video downloads, denser network coverage and the possibility of connecting billions of everyday electronic objects to support "the Internet of things".

"With 5G, Europe has a great opportunity to reinvent its telecom industrial landscape," Guenther Oettinger, the EU's commissioner for the digital economy and society, told Mobile World Congress 2015 in Barcelona on Tuesday.

In June last year, the European Commission signed an agreement with South Korea, in which the two sides committed to cooperating on setting technical standards and ensuring the necessary radio frequencies are able to support the new network.

"It is our intention to sign similar agreements with other key regions of the world, notably Japan, China, and the United States," Oettinger said.

The commission will soon start formal discussions about 5G with China, according to a person familiar with the matter. China is also keen to have its say on what 5G should do, and is home to Huawei, the world's second-biggest maker of mobile network equipment, and ZTE, the fifth-biggest.

But St'ephane Richard, CEO of France's Orange, said work remained to be done on 4G, whose rollout across Europe has been patchy and slow. "We need to prepare for 5G, but let's not jump too fast. We should enjoy 4G."

Most industry experts expect the first commercial deployments of 5G in the run-up to the Tokyo Olympics in 2020.

Much work remains to be done to set technical standards for the technology, and figure out exactly what it is supposed to do that current 4G gear cannot, experts say.

In the meantime, companies that make mobile network equipment such as Huawei, Sweden's Ericsson, Finland's Nokia and France's Alcatel-Lucent are jockeying for position and carrying out experiments with operators to prepare for 5G.

Japan's NTT DoCoMo is already working with Nokia and Ericsson to develop networks running at high frequencies for use in the 5G wireless era ? technology expected to be showcased at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics.

Meanwhile, Huawei has said it will invest $600 million in 5G research and expects to have a network ready for deployment by 2020.

"We are closely working with our customers to get to 5G. It is the only way to fully meet the demand of machine-to-machine technology," said Huawei CEO Ken Hu.

Head of Nokia Rajeev Suri said he thinks the drive to develop 5G technology promises to be a "three-horse race" between Ericsson, Huawei and his firm, leaving out fourth-biggest equipment maker Alcatel-Lucent.

"I don't aspire only to be third," said Suri during a panel discussion on Tuesday. "We will move up."

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