Global Stakeholders Must Be Engaged to Develop 5G Standards -Gwandu

Dr Bashir Gwandu, former acting CEO of the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) and the chairman Commonwealth ITU Group, has called on all Fifth Generation (5G) systems engineers and standards developers to ensure full engagement with key stakeholders around the globe when developing standards for the 5G to succeed and avoid the pitfalls of other technologies such as the Wimax and even the 3G.

Gwandu made the call in London during his analysis of the 5G development efforts as part of his presentation on “Delivering a sustainable and long-term 5G future” at the recently concluded 2nd International Conference on 5G Hurdle 2016 organized in London by Wireless World Research Forum –a group of leading experts and researchers on 5G networks in association with Forum Europe.

Gwandu spoke on a number of strategies that the experts need to adopt for 5G to have a sustainable future.

In particular, he spoke on ensuring sustained research effort; Global stakeholder engagement and collaboration; Innovative regulation and policy development; Technical Standards harmonization and Spectrum availability and early release; Infrastructure design and harmonization; Co-existence and network interference minimization; Security, Privacy, Resilience, and Reliability; partnership and funding.

On research effort, Gwandu suggested more focus on latency reduction, resilience, availability for confidence building, Spectral efficiency and Speed, Mobility, and antenna versatility.

He spoke on timely spectrum release and adequate planning and harmonized slots/channel arrangements.

On innovative policies, he spoke on Technology neutrality, Infrastructure deployment and coverage, Accurate digital and regular update of high-resolution maps and accurate positioning, Weather and ecological consideration in antenna deployments, etc.

Importantly, Gwandu was very emphatic about the need to carry all key stakeholders and major end-users along in requirement capture for standards development –mentioning some stakeholders such as  governments, regulators, verticals such as auto-manufacturers, transport and logistics industries, retail and general Fast-moving consumers goods sellers, Health and social care institutions, Business and financial services, and experts from various user groups.

Gwandu said for technology that is expected to be relied on by driver-less cars and independents robots in everyday life from roads, car parks, utility control centers, shops and homes as well as surveillance systems with sub-millisecond signal delay, much is expected for confidence building if it is to be sustainable.

On the technical sides Gwandu spoke strongly on making sure that all efforts be made harmonized for Radio Access Technologies (RATS) as well as harmonized spectrum bands between Europe and Americas for 5G usage citing amongst many other bands the 24GHz, the 28GHz, the 31GHz and 66GHz bands.