LIVE FROM GSMA MOBILE 360 NORTH AMERICA: Vendors Ericsson and Qualcomm insist the US is “on track” to introduce 5G within a 2020 timeframe, but warned the danger of launching the technology too early could mean it “doesn’t make a big enough jump from 4G”.

Speaking in a keynote panel session, Ericsson’s North America CTO and head of strategy Glenn Laxdal said it was unlikely the US would fall behind in developing the solution, despite some of the early noises coming out of other mature markets like Europe and Asia, insisting that it is typically a five year period before operators get interested in “pushing the envelope on the next generation of mobile”.

“With 4G and 3G, it happened roughly five years before the launch of the next-generation technology and that’s what we see now. For us at Ericsson, it’s equally important to get involved now as we will be part of the standardisation process due to complete at the end of 2016.”

Laxdal said it was now up to the operators to “also join the discussion over the next 18 months, identify what the requirements are and then start to work towards delivering the technology. 4G was the same. The Asian operators started early, then the US players really began to define what was required for it to launch.”

Both Laxdal and fellow panellist Matt Grob, EVP and CTO at Qualcomm, said they wanted to see “5G make a big step” from existing 4G, meaning the introduction of a brand new air interface, “which will support both high speed and internet of things”, added Grob.

The Qualcomm executive said the company has been working on 5G for years, but “much more so in the past year”, while stating the US commitment to boosting LTE coverage through new spectrum types, multicast, broadcast and peer to peer would in the end “serve as pre-cursors to 5G”.

“Those are the many elements that we are set to see with 5G, so in North America we are developing 5G type technology today, and we are going to be able to do trials and early deployments with whoever wants to go faster. We however have the timeframes in place because we don’t want to quickly adapt from 4G. There is still a lot of life left in 4G.”

Also on the panel was ZTE’s VP, CTO team, Sean Cai, who said the gap between 4G and 5G remained big, warning that despite a scheduled 2020 launch “5G is still not defined at all”.

He believes the eventual winners emerging from the race to introduce 5G first could actually be those that adopt the technology in the second or third tier, making the market more competitive by evolving the technology.

“The wave of innovation comes from someone behind, and it could even be the vendors. You look at how to upgrade the first network and move it forward.”