If you want to get a hint on what 5G would look like, the recently held Johannesberg Summit is the right place to visit. Don’t worry if you missed the event because all the talks, except panel discussions, can be viewed at the summit website: here. Actually, the summit was mentioned several times in the Unwired People site, but I think it deserves far more attention.
The Johannesberg Summit was full of inspiring talks and discussions. Professor Jens Zander already summarized the discussions there in his blog posts (click here and here). And, here is my own take. We, wireless guys, tend to think that 5G is all about radio access technology, but it’s not. It is about overall network architecutre. Even bigger, it is about the whole wireless ecosystem. Already now, the communication network is a vast collection of computers. How to utilize these computers and how to decides who computes what are key challenges of the future, and perhaps where the innovation potential is.
