5G Americas Attracts, Builds Consensus for Expanding Wireless Ecosystem

Early instances of 5G in the United States have limited coverage, but the work from standards adoption to commercial deployments is occurring at a rapid pace, Chris Pearson, president of 5G Americas, told SDxCentral this week at the Big 5G Event. “5G is a commercial reality [and] I think we’re at the very tip of the iceberg of what 5G is and will be as far as a transformational technology,” he said. “This year we expect overall 25 total commercial deployments (globally), so we will start building momentum pretty quick.” Looking ahead to 2020 when the commercialization of the standalone 5G standard is formally adopted, Pearson expects deployments to really hit their stride as more carriers that have been waiting to do 5G on a standalone basis enter the space. Meanwhile, discussions about the potential services and use cases to be enabled by 5G is an important effort, Pearson explained. “If you start to look at this new era that we’re moving into and want to move into, it’s more transformational about hyper-connectivity and starting to think about wireless cellular technology without the limits that we’ve always had in terms of capacity, latency, and how many sensors we can support in a geographic area.”