Top Tech 2018

Blimp Cell
Towers Head
Skyward

This year, Altaeros

Energies plans to
launch the first of its
tethered-blimp cell
SuperTowers. Each
aerostat, floating
up to 600 meters
above the ground,
will provide
coverage equal
to 30 traditional
cell towers.
The blimps are
intended for remote
locations where
broadband service
is too difficult or
costly to supply
by conventional
means. Several other
companies aim to

5G GOES
do similar things,
including Google,
with its Project
Loon balloons, and

FOR THE GOLD

Facebook, with
its solar-powered
Internet drone,
Aquila. Altaeros’s
other big push is in South Korean telecom companies will try to win over
high-altitude wind Olympic fans with spectacular wireless demos
turbines. Who knew

W
you could build a
diversified business
around lofting tech-
laden tethered e l c om e t o t h e 5 G Oly m pic s, where
balloons?
Nathan Chen, the 18-year-old figure-skating
phenom, has just landed another quadruple
jump. Can’t see him well from your seat in the
nosebleed section? No problem. Just slip on your
5G virtual reality headset for a 360-degree rink-side view! Now watch
your step—we’re boarding the 5G bus to the next attraction. Check out
the windows: They’re in fact transparent display screens providing
ultrahigh-­definition video—streamed live—from a hockey player’s
headcam, from drones flying above the ski slopes, and from the cockpit of
a bobsled barreling down an icy track at 100…120…150 kilometers per hour!

32  | JAN 2018 | NORTH AMERICAN | SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG ILLUSTRATION BY MCKIBILLO; PHOTO-ILLUSTRATION BY Gluekit


“At best, what will be demon­
strated are some early lab
prototypes that will look roughly
similar to what 5G standards will
eventually incorporate”
That’s what you can expect next month at the Winter Olym-
pics in Pyeongchang, if South Korea’s telecommunications
companies are to be believed. KT Corp. (formerly Korea Tele-
com), the Games’ official sponsor, has announced plans for
the first big test run of networking technologies that could
herald peak download rates up to 100 times as fast as today’s
4G systems, with delays as low as 1 millisecond.
Not to be outdone, KT’s competitors SK Telecom and LG U+
are preparing their own 5G Olympic demos. Meanwhile, the
South Korean government and the European Union have
teamed up to fund still another trial, dubbed 5G Champion,
that will include a broadband link between the Olympic
Games and a 5G test-bed in Finland.
It’s understandable why they’re all jumping on this band-
wagon. After all, there’s no bigger stage for showcasing the
possibilities of a new technology than the Olympics. Just as
past Games introduced the world to television (Berlin, 1936),
satellite broadcasting (Tokyo, 1964), fiber optics (Los Angeles,
1984), and the CCD camera (Barcelona, 1992), Pyeongchang
could give spectators a glimpse at the 5G future.
But the mobile industry may be promising more than it
can deliver. And KT and SK Telecom have been suspiciously
reticent to share details about exactly what they plan to dem-
onstrate at the next Olympics. “I think hype is a good word”
to describe what’s been advertised, says Michael Thelander,
the president and founder of Signals Research Group.
5G networks, like their 4G LTE predecessors, will evolve in
stages, with the first global standards set to arrive later this
year. But consumers will likely have to wait until at least 2019
to buy 5G phones and tablets. “There’s no way in hell there are
going to be commercial services [at the Pyeongchang Olym-
pics] based on something that’s standardized,” Thelander says.
“At best,” says Henning Schulzrinne, a former advisor to
the U.S. Federal Communications Commission and a pro-
fessor at Columbia University, “what will be demonstrated
are some early lab prototypes that will look roughly similar
to what 5G standards will eventually incorporate.”
Indeed, KT is deploying its pilot system based on its own
“Pyeongchang 5G Specifications.” Exactly what that pilot sys-
tem will entail is unclear. “We’ve been adding functionalities
and capabilities as we go,” says Jawad Manssour of Ericsson-
LG, a joint venture of Sweden’s Ericsson and South Korea’s
LG Electronics, which is supplying the system’s “end-to-end”
KT CORP.
infrastructure, from the core network to the radio base stations.
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What is clear is that the system will provide digital com-
munications at 28 gigahertz, a spectral band that will likely
play a big role in 5G networks because it offers vastly more
bandwidth than traditional cellular channels below 6 GHz.
Operators have long avoided such high frequencies—also
known as millimeter waves—because they don’t pass as
easily through objects or even the air.
5G pioneers have attacked this problem by sending and
receiving signals using compact arrays of hundreds of
antenna elements. By adjusting the signals sent to each
element, they can direct radio energy in concentrated
beams, increasing gain as the beams follow mobile users
through what could be a very cluttered environment. This
scheme, called massive MIMO, also allows base stations to
use the same frequencies to connect with many users at
once, thereby making more efficient use of limited spectrum.
In addition, Pyeongchang’s 5G-flavored digital networks
will make good use of virtualization, whereby basic net-
working functions such as caching and routing—which
traditionally require dedicated hardware—will instead be
carried out by software. This setup lets operators reconfig-
ure a network or deploy new services quickly and cheaply
using virtual machines running on generic hardware.
Virtualization will likely be common in 5G architectures,
which will need to accommodate many different wireless
products—including driverless cars, smart appliances, and
industrial robots.
“You need so many pieces to fall in the right place at the right
time to make things work,” Manssour says. The Pyeongchang
trials will show if that’s now possible, but they are only the
beginning. “It’s still early days,” he says. “With these precom-
mercial systems, the goal is just to give users a feel of what
they could get with 5G. What the commercial networks will
be—we’ll have to wait and see.” —A r iel Bleicher
PREP WORK: This past July, engineers from KT Corp. installed
5G equipment at a ski jump being readied for the Winter Olympic
Games in Pyeongchang, South Korea.
SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG | NORTH AMERICAN | JAN 2018 |  33