Thanks to TIM, Turin is becoming the 5G capital. For one day, telephone operators and sector experts met to define the emerging scenarios and guidelines in the international scene, starting with standards and finishing with the first prototypes created by the TILab laboratories and the leading technological players, from research to the latest experiments made on a global level.
The day aimed to increase knowledge of use cases and new technological and business opportunities, which 5G technology will introduce to the market from 2020. The meeting was in fact an opportunity to get closer to the new generation of mobile networks, characterised not just by the capacity of up to 10 Gbit/s (hundreds of times greater than 4G), but also of connecting to an extremely high number of devices per sq km (up to hundreds of thousands) and with extremely low latency, to the millisecond.
All this makes us to understand how 5G will allow us to supply lots of new services, not only in person-toperson communication, but also for those millions of sensors that can be connected to the network, enabling a fully connected society. TIM, through this initiative, confirms its role as the European leader in research and in the definition process of 5G standards, in the context of interest groups and international standards (NGMN, 3GPP, ITU),European projects (e.g. iJoin, MiWaves and the new XHaul, FlexGware, FANTASTIC5G and METIS 2) and through two experimental initiatives developed alongside universities.
Amongst the various services, particular attention was paid to the Internet Of Things: ultra-light and low consumption sensors put inside the fabric of our clothing to check our health (temperature, blood pressure, heartbeat, etc.), to automatic traffic control systems and assisted driving for vehicles, to the realtimetransmission of extremely high quality video.
The new generation 5G, which will transform our society from 2020, will therefore see evolutions not just in radio access, but also in network architecture, which will be natively cloud (NFV), programmable according to traffic and service demands (SDN).
The meeting was attended by Roberto Opilio - Chief of Operations at Telecom Italia, Gabriela Styf Sjoman -Head of Telecom Italia Engineering & TILab, Sandro Dionisi - Head of Telecom Italia Global Advisor Services,Rachid El Attachi – Deutsche Telekom Head of Network Strategy, Jonas Näslund – Head of Radio Strategy, Ericsson, Maziar Nekovee - 5G Europe Chief Researcher, Samsung, Arnaud Vanparys – Head of Network Innovation, Orange, Artur Wachtel – 5G Global Strategy Supervisor, Huawei, and Volker Ziegler - Chief Architect Technology and Innovation, Nokia.
A number of demos were presented during the day, some of which were a sneak preview for Europe, such as those proposed by Ericsson, Nokia, Huawei, Samsung, NEC and Alcatel Lucent, as well as the American start-up Kumu with the full duplex, a Virtual RAN demonstrator based on an open source project (collaboration between TIM and the University of Pisa) and the European iJOIN project, focused on RAN solutions as a 5G service, which TIM participated in.
Turin, 22 June 2015
