The business world is all about seeing opportunities and taking advantage of them. The music world is all about playing your cards right. The tech world is all about being the first to make an idea the best that the public can expect it to be. Politics is all about figuring out the best solution and painting it in the most positive light possible. Education is all about figuring out how best to adapt the human mind to a fixed curriculum, accounting for exceptional students. What do all of these fields have in common? They can all benefit from 5G, and thus should unite to help bring it to being. That is the point that the IEEE is trying to drive home by creating an organization aimed at helping them to do just that.
Currently, the IEEE 5G Initiative is looking for volunteer members across academic fields and the professional world, especially in the telecom industry, which would be ground zero for the 5G revolution as it begins to roll out. The goal is for the various players from different fields to get together and solve some of the regulatory, technological, economic, and consumer hurdles associated with making 5G happen in a massive fashion worldwide, as well as figuring out how best to reap the benefits of 5G in a variety of use scenarios and across a wide range of different user bases.
Ashutosh Dutta, the lead of Technical Staff at AT&T, along with Gerhard Fettweis, the Senior Research Scientist at the International Computer Science Institute and Vodafone Chair Professor at TU Dresden, are leading up the effort. Interestingly, Fettweis has written about internet that will exceed the speed of light with a round-trip transfer latency of only a single millisecond, called the Tactile Internet. This may well be achievable with the technologies and standards being developed for 5G, though it may not happen any time soon. This is just one example of where networks could go from the foundations currently being laid out for 5G, and represents the future that everybody in the industry has been talking about; a connection so fast, and with so little latency, that it allows entirely new use cases unlike anything seen so far in the telecom world.