Digital Indian Gov

Most of the hype about 5G wireless networks centers on faster data speeds for phones and laptops. But there's a whole range of internet-connected things out there that stand to also benefit from this faster, more robust connection of the future, perhaps none more so than tomorrow's cars. 

While the major US carriers will activate their 5G wireless networks in 2019, widespread automotive adoption is probably a few years away. But when 5G does hit the road, the benefits in cars will be similar to those for smartphones: bringing data into the car for passenger and driver consumption; and sending more data out at a faster rate. 

More and more of today's modern cars boast some sort of local area Wi-Fi hotspot feature that allows passengers' mobile devices to share an onboard 4G LTE connection. LTE can be pretty fast, but it also can get bogged down when everyone in the car or nearby is using smartphones and tablets to stream music, video and data. That's where 5G comes in: Its manyfold increase in bandwidth and speed means that every seat in a seven-passenger SUV could stream a different HD (or 4K) Netflix show without breaking a sweat. OK, so the kids won't be watching the scenery on a car trip. But as they're glued to a screen, hopefully they won't ask, "How much longer?"

If you're a driver too busy keeping your eyes on the road, you can still see the benefits of 5G in the car. Automakers will be able to take advantage of that bandwidth to bring rich media and more information into the dashboard. For example, the Byton K-Byte concept's massive dashboard display is betting heavily on 5G to power its connected media, health monitoring and social tech. As more of the web seeps into the cockpit, automakers will follow.

A 5G connection works both ways, and there will be benefits to both the driver and the automaker from being able to draw more data out of the car, including better remote monitoring and faster remote control of autonomous cars.

If you've ever used a phone or smartwatch to remotely unlock your car, you'll know that the time between tapping the app and getting a response on the car can be anywhere from a few seconds to a few minutes on 4G. There's a similar delay when, for example, you remotely request battery status on a plug-in hybrid. The reason for the lag is that both tasks require a lot of information to be sent over a wireless connection. But 5G will be a low-latency technology, meaning that it can process more information with little delay. The result is that in addition to a minor increase in convenience, 5G could mean that your phone replaces your key fob completely, allowing web-authenticated locking and unlocking that's less fiddly than NFC and more secure.

This will almost certainly become the case as alternative ownership models -- including car-sharing services, vehicle subscription services and corporate vehicle fleets -- begin to grow and cloud-based driver profiles allow drivers to move seamlessly from car to car. One day, you could park your Audi at LAX, land in New York and hop into another Audi, unlocking it with an app over 5G while instantly downloading your seating position, contacts and favorite playlists.

More and more, the cars of the future will move toward electrification -- whether it's full-battery electrics or plug-in hybrids -- and almost every electrified car needs to be connected to the web in some way. There are just too many benefits for them not to be: from remotely monitoring battery levels and charging status to searching for charging stations and smart route planning. 5G promises to streamline today's sometimes clunky connections.

The same low-latency benefits mentioned above apply here. A 5G connection between the car, the web and your mobile device could allow more granular monitoring of battery level when, for example, you're plugged into a public charging station. Instantaneous updates could help you catch that annoying neighbor who keeps unplugging your EV in the act.

While on the road, a faster connection to infrastructure and traffic monitoring can help smart EVs plan efficient routes that maximize range. Meanwhile, more robust connections to charging networks could mean an end to arriving to a charging station only to find it occupied.

In the short term, autonomous vehicles will have to share the road with human drivers. So onboard processing will be more important to self-driving cars than cloud computing. They'll have to be able to react to unpredictable driving conditions, even in areas where connectivity isn't so great. However, that doesn't mean that there won't be any short-term benefits to 5G-connected self-driving cars.

Udelv, for example, is testing self-driving delivery vehicles in California. Per state law, a human "safety driver" is required during testing phase to aid in tricky situations like construction zones. Eventually, the startup hopes to use low-latency networks and remote safety drivers that can command the trucks from a central data center.

A 5G connection would, in theory, allow a few humans to monitor a fleet of autonomous trucks with the zero input lag that's necessary for safe remote control. No doubt autonomous tech companies like Waymo and Uber, automakers and other self-driving startups are eyeing 5G for this very reason.

Looking further down the road to a day when truly self-driving cars are more widespread, 5G connectivity will begin to play a much larger role.

Autonomous cars that can communicate with each other (V2V) and the infrastructure (V2X) have the potential to pull off all sorts of neat tricks. Platooning, for example, allows self-driving car or trucks to move together in formation, reducing aerodynamic losses on the highway and drastically reducing traffic inefficiency in urban areas.

The next time you're at a traffic light, watch how the cars start moving one after another when the light turns green and how much time is wasted waiting for (often distracted) drivers to react. Now imagine every car in a column taking off simultaneously the instant the light changes. This would only be possible with a no-lag connection between the cars and the traffic light, the sort of connection promised by 5G.

Meanwhile, every one of those autonomous cars will be packed to the gills with sensors -- cameras, radar, lidar and more -- collecting petabytes of data every day. Collecting even a fraction of that data is invaluable to improving everything from city planning to just making self-driving cars smarter through distributed computing, but doing so will require a beefy data connection.

From more efficient and entertaining commuting to smarter self-driving cars, this is just the tip of the iceberg. Below the surface are the trucking industry, fleet management, logistics companies and mega retailers, all busy brainstorming ways that big data -- perhaps backed by robust 5G wireless connectivity or whatever lies beyond -- can change the way we move people and goods around the world and into the future.

US President Donald Trump recently blocked microchip maker Broadcom Ltd's $117 billion takeover of rival Qualcomm amid concerns that it would give China the upper hand in the next generation of mobile communications, or 5G. Below are some facts about 5G and major players.
What is 5G? 5G networks, now in the final testing stage, will rely on denser arrays of small antennas and the cloud to offer data speeds up to 50 or 100 times faster than current 4G networks and serve as critical infrastructure for a range of industries. Deals to start building mass-market 5G networks are still largely a year away, but by 2025, 1.2 billion people are set to have access to 5G networks - a third of them in China, according to the global wireless trade group GSMA. Moving to new networks promises to enable new mobile services and even whole new business models, but could pose challenges for countries and industries unprepared to invest in the transition. Unlike the upgrades of cellular standards 2G in the early 1990s, 3G around the millennium and 4G in 2010, 5G standards will deliver not just faster phone and computer data but also help connect up cars, machines, cargo and crop equipment.
Why is the US worried? The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), which vets acquisitions of US corporations by foreign companies, said the Broadcom takeover risked weakening Qualcomm, which would boost China over the United States in the 5G race.
Acquiring Qualcomm would represent the jewel in the crown of Broadcom's portfolio of communications chips, which supply wi-fi, power management, video and other features in smartphones alongside Qualcomm's core baseband chips - radio modems that wirelessly connect phones to networks. The concern is that a takeover by Singapore-based Broadcom could see the firm cut research and development spending by Qualcomm or hive off strategically important parts of the company to other buyers, including in China, U.S. officials and analysts have said. 5G promises to open up the clubby world of telecom equipment by creating openings for a far wider range of players in hardware, software and semiconductors, many of them from Asia, increasing the dependence of Silicon Valley on foreign players.
Major players in ther 5G race Before the new technology becomes a reality for consumers, two transitions need to take place. Mobile operators have to upgrade their networks with 5G gear made by the likes of Huawei and ZTE of China, Sweden's Ericsson and Finland's Nokia. And phone makers need to make handsets with built-in 5G radios ready to hook up to networks. Qualcomm is the dominant player in smartphone communications chips, making half of all core baseband radio chips in smartphones. It is one of the last big US technology companies with a major role in mobile communications hardware. Most other baseband chips come from Asia. MediaTek of Taiwan holds about one quarter of the market, while Samsung Electronics and Huawei -- two big smartphone makers -- develop chips for their own devices.
Huawei does through a subsidiary known as HiSilicon. Its dominant position in 5G comes from its mastery of two areas: Getting its patents adopted in what are known as standards and then selling the chip designs that work with those standards. The standards are set by a global body to ensure all phones work across different mobile networks, and whoever's essential patents end up making it into the standard stands to reap huge royalty licensing revenue streams.
Qualcomm has landed a number of these foundational patents, which means that both handset makers and telecommunications gear makers will have to pay it licensing fees. It dominated standards setting in 3G and 4G wireless and looks set to top the list of patent holders heading into the 5G cycle. Huawei, Nokia, Ericsson and others are also vying to amass 5G patents, which has helped spur complex cross-licensing agreements like the deal struck late last year Nokia and Huawei around handsets.

The first 5G mobile devices should finally arrive next year, which means that smartphone manufacturers are hammering out the details right now. Unlike a lot of other component improvements that smartphones have seen over the last decade, like better cameras, faster processors, and brighter screens, 5G radios are going to demand some design compromises that will look decidedly backwards — at least for consumers that are used to thinner and sleeker devices coming out like clockwork. The problem, as Lightreading points out, is that 5G will rely on much higher-frequency spectrum than our current mobile networks use.
The higher frequencies enable those multi-gigabit speeds that the networks have been hyping so much, but at the cost of penetration. Higher frequency radio waves travel less distance than mid-band or low-band signals, and most importantly, they don’t penetrate through objects well. Why does this matter for smartphone design? Well, because if the hand holding the phone is sitting over the antenna or obstructing the line-of-sight to the cell station, then your connection may be impaired or lost.
At the very least, that means smartphone manufacturers are going to have to design in multiple antennas, which could change what materials devices are made from, as well as their shape and size. Metal backs are likely to vanish altogether, and even the metal sides that are a staple of modern flagship smartphones could be designed out. For the initial round of 5G devices, we could also see a return to the incredibly ugly antenna nubs that were a staple of earlier cellphones. Motorola’s recently-unveiled 5G Moto Mod, for example, has a nub that wouldn’t look out of place on a 2003 flip phone. The other consequence of 5G’s design limitations could be that it takes even longer for 5G smartphones to become mainstream.
Even if the first 5G networks and devices are released early next year, it’ll be years until 5G networks are more common. Rolling out 5G across a broad swathe of spectrums will take even more work than upgrading networks from 3G to 4G, as the wireless carriers will have to build hundreds of small-cell sites in every city. While that work is going on, smartphone makers might not want to make their flagship smartphones uglier and more expensive in order to include a feature that 90% of customers won’t be able to access. Apple, in particular, has never been in a rush to include the latest cellular technologies in its iPhones, especially if it comes at the cost of design compromises.

More than a dozen global smartphone and PC OEMs have tied up with Qualcomm to incorporate the Snapdragon X50 5G NR modem on to their mobile devices. Qualcomm has said the first smartphones featuring its X50 5G NR modem will hit the market in 2019, with Chinese brand Vivo promising such a handset next year.
Major mobile phone OEMs joining hands with Qualcomm to incorporate the 5G modem in their future smartphones include the likes of Xiaomi, Nokia brand licensee HMD Global, Sony, LG, HTC, Oppo, and ZTE. Other OEMs that have partnered with Qualcomm are Fujitsu, Inseego/ Novatel Wireless, NetComm Wireless, Netgear, Sharp, Sierra Wireless, Telit, Wingtech, and WNC.
Devices by these OEMs will be built around the sub-6GHz and millimetre wave (mmWave) spectrum bands starting next year. Apart from smartphones, the new Snapdragon X50 5G NR modem will be available on Always Connected PCs, Head-Mounted Displays (HMDs) - including Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR) and Extended Reality (XR) - and Mobile Broadband. Qualcomm claims this technology will offer faster browsing, faster downloads, better streaming, and instant cloud access on phones.
The modem will enable high speed and low latency for Always Connected PCs, and ultra-low latency for HMDs. "As evidenced by our work with these distinguished OEMs from around the globe and as we demonstrated in 3G and 4G LTE, Qualcomm Technologies is utilizing our deep expertise and technology leadership to support the successful launch of 5G NR, driving innovation in the mobile ecosystem," said Alex Katouzian, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Mobile, Qualcomm Technologies.
Separately, Qualcomm has also partnered with several wireless network operators in the above mentioned sub-6GHz and millimetre wave (mmWave) bands. These include AT&T, British Telecom, Sprint, China Telecom, China Mobile, China Unicom, NTT DOCOMO, Orange, Verizon, Telstra, Singtel among others.
The upcoming trials will combine Qualcomm's 5G platform and smartphone reference design with an aim to commercialise compliant 5G products later this year. To further showcase this, planned demonstrations will be held at this year's Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. The Qualcomm booth is expected to have Snapdragon X50 modems reaching speeds of "several gigabits per second." A HTC handset with 5G support, said to be the U12, was recently showcased at an industry event in Taiwan. The handset was shown delivering download speeds of 809.58Mbps.