LIVE FROM GSMA MOBILE WORLD CONGRESS SHANGHAI 2015: Ericsson’s CTO for the APAC region, Magnus Ewerbring (pictured), told Mobile World Live that further development of 5G and LTE technologies must be linked, following recent operator comments that the industry should continue to develop 4G because it cannot stand still waiting for its successor’s appearance.

The vendor supports 5G being based on two radio access parts, said Ewerbring. One part is LTE Evolution which extends on LTE-Advanced and other improvements added to LTE. The other part includes “more radical changes” addressing very high bitrates in high bandwidths, he added.

“The two parts are aligned on higher protocol layers. 5G will therefore naturally drive the further evolution of LTE,” he pointed out, speaking ahead of his appearance at this week’s session on 5G Leadership in the Asia Pacific Region.

Operator agreement 
An Orange executive recently urged the industry to continue developing 4G technology to meet evolving customer needs. Alain Maloberti, SVP of network architecture and design at Orange Group, warned that “we cannot stand still for five years in order to wait for 5G”.

Elsewhere, the Ericsson executive also threw out a few examples of 5G existing in test form. The vendor has demonstrated over-the-air tests of pre-5G systems, which are still 20-30 times faster than today’s networks.

In Asia-Pacific, it signed 5G MoUs with CAICT (China Academy of Information and Communications Technology), Japan’s NTT Docomo, Korea Telecom, Singtel and Telstra.

At this year’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Ericsson demonstrated the kind of services that might be expected with 5G-based M2M, including an excavator that was remotely controlled thousands of kilometres away. Low latency is essential to such an application, which 5G can deliver.

Recently, a consortium including Ericsson started 5G research on real-time control of equipment in mines. The consortium will assess the possibilities of 5G with very short latency providing the basis for real-time control. “The latency shall be significantly lower than in today’s systems, perhaps down to 1 miilisecond end-to-end.”