Japan and South Korea stoked up their friendly rivalry in the race to 5G on Wednesday, with industry groups from both countries talking up the progress each has made with developing the next generation of mobile technology.
"There is a degree of competition, but it’s friendly competition and constructive competition and it will come up with a good result," noted Colin Langtry, chief of the ITU-R’s (Radiocommunication Sector’s) study group, during a panel discussion at CommunicAsia.
Korea had the honour of taking to the stage first, as Youngnam Han, chair of the steering committee at Korea’s 5G Forum charted the recent history of 5G in his country and discussed some of the contents of three whitepapers his group published in March.
The documents set out the 5G Forum vision of the KPIs for 5G networks and identify promising candidate technologies that could meet them. They also cover spectrum requirements and the candidate frequency bands that it believes Korea should consider.
The KPIs are in line with the eight requirements set out by the ITU-R, such as peak data rates in the tens of Gigabits per second, latency of one millisecond, and a maximum end user-speed at which a mobile connection can be maintained of 500 kilometres per hour. The 5G Forum has also added a positioning requirement that stipulates that the network should be capable of pinpointing a terminal’s location to "within a few centimetres," Han said.
"Korea and Japan are the leading countries," when it comes to 5G, Han said, attributing the early success to the accumulation of device makers and network equipment vendors in the two countries.
Korea’s 5G public private partnership (PPP) has allocated US$1.5 billion for research and development between 2014 and 2020, when 5G is expected to be standardised. However, Korea aims to launch what it calls ‘pre-standard’ 5G in time for the PyeongChang Winter Olympics in 2018.
Han was not giving much away when he was asked how similar pre-standard 5G will be to standardised 5G.
"It will be anything that meets the eight KPIs laid down by the ITU-R," he said.
"Not surprisingly, the Japanese plan is very similar to the Korean plan – it’s because we’re neighbours," joked Hiroyuki Morika wa, chairman of the strategy and planning committee at the Fifth Generation Mobile Communications Promotion Forum (5GMF), based in Tokyo.
However, Japan hopes to steal the limelight away from Korea, though perhaps not all of it, by conducting a 5G proof-of-concept (PoC) demonstration before the next Winter Olympics.
"We are currently having very intense discussions about selecting PoC systems so we can show off a 5G PoC by the end of 2017," said Morikawa.
Japan aims to outline its 5G PoC by the end of June this year, he added.
