LIVE FROM 5G WORLD 2018, LONDON: Berit Svendsen, CEO of Telenor Norway (pictured), believes it is imperative operators take the right approach to constructing 5G networks and developing business cases to ensure the technology delivers on its potential.

“We need to build out in a profitable way. We need to find good use cases, and we believe that 5G will be driven from the business users and the public sector, not from the individual users, as we have seen for 2G, 3G and 4G. So there is a difference there, there are new customer segments that we need to find good use cases for. 5G will happen: the momentum is high in the industry,” she said.

Echoing other speakers at the event, Svendsen noted 4G will still do a lot of the heavy lifting for operators, at least in the medium term: “We need to utilise all the investments that have been made in 4G when we are moving on to 5G. So it’s not a question about 4G or 5G: it needs to be combined,” she said.

But “a G doesn’t last for ever. There is time for 5G to deploy around 2020.”

Improved experience
Key drivers will be continued growth in data and new use cases which will be “better on 5G infrastructure than on 4G”.

“The 5G network will have some characteristics that the 4G network doesn’t have. It will have significantly higher speed, above 1Gb/s; it will have ultra-low latency, about 1 millisecond; and you can connect a lot more things to the network in a lot more efficient way than you can on 4G. 5G will, at the end of the day, be a much more efficient platform for carrying all this traffic,” Svendsen said.

The CEO discussed five sectors which are being explored: autonomous vehicles and ships, in the latter case removing traffic from the road network; fish farming, a significant business for Norway; remote healthcare, which is important in a country with a dispersed population; and emergency network provision.

Fixed wireless access is also on the list, due to a Telenor plan to shut its copper network by 2025.