5G to become available by 2020: Ericsson

Chang Gang, chief marketing officer of Ericsson (China) Communications Co Ltd speaks  at an Ericsson workshop themed "Trends on ICT development in 2015" in January 2015 in Beijing.

Equipment and devices that support 5G will become commercially available by 2020, said Ericsson, a Swedish communications technology and services provider.

According to Ericsson, by 2020, the 5G networks will support voice, video and a complex range of communication services for more than nine billion subscriptions and billions of connected devices around the world.

"We've seen that the development of 5G has a long way to go as different organizations and different nations have distinct standards and blue maps for their systems' upgrade and improvement," said Chang Gang, chief marketing officer of Ericsson (China) Communications Co Ltd, at an Ericsson workshop themed "Trends on ICT development in 2015" in January 2015 in Beijing.

According to Chang, countries such as Japan and South Korea have all launched their 5G development strategy and both have claimed that the nation's 5G system will be built in 2020 and 2018 separately, during the Winter Olympic Games that will be held in the two countries.

"So far, there's no development timeframe has been scheduled in China, while we have created IMT-2020 to promote the technology usage," Chang added.

Two years ago, in February, 2013, an IMT-2020 (5G) advance group aimed at erecting a 5G technology research and standard promotion platform in the country has been jointly built by China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, National Development and Reform Commission and the Ministry of Science and Technology, which is prior to the commercialization of 4G on the Chinese mainland.

During a latest press conference, Mao Weiming, vice minister of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT), said that China's 4G users topped 90 million by the end of December, 2014, almost a year after the issuance of 4G licenses to China Mobile, China Telecom and China Unicom.

According to MIIT, China's telecom business revenues increased 3.6 percent in 2014, 5.1 percent lower than in 2013. And thanks to improved telecom infrastructure,the growth of 4G network users surpassed that of 3G users. Last year, 972.8 million people subscribed to the former, while the latter attracted 836.4 million.

According to a report released in October last year, Ericsson explains that 5G is the next chapter of telecom networks designed to meet a more advanced and more complex set of performance requirements.

"It encompasses innovative network design for deploying machine-type communication (MTC). And 5G networks will be able to efficiently support applications with widely varying operational parameters, providing greater flexibility to deploy services," said the report.

According to a latest white paper announced by Ericsson in January 2015, the pressure on the networks that provide unprecedented ability to share information is palpable. Therefore, 5G systems will be built to enable logical network slices, which will enable operators to provide networks on an as-a-service basis and meet the wide range of use cases that the 2020 timeframe will demand.