Blog: Making progress on international Mobilstandard 5G - Hoofdinhoud

Yesterday, I attended the second 5G Global event in Rome, organised by the European Union's 5G Public Private Partnership. This was a great opportunity to engage once again with the international community to make 5G a global success. China, Japan, South Korea and the US were present.

Under the theme "enabling the 5G ecosphere" we looked at the progress achieved so far on deployments, the road that still needs to be covered, and how to intensify international cooperation across stakeholders until 2020. Our forum included the 5G Industrial Association and 5G organisations from China, Japan, South Korea and the USA.

The 5G Industrial Association did an excellent job in hosting the event. I was particularly impressed with the exhibition area displaying 17 European 5G-PPP Phase 1 projects that presented their latest results. Many of them run live demos of their work, a remarkable achievement as almost all projects started only a year ago. The event was also an occasion to reward the winners of the first Horizon Prize contests in the areas of spectrum and optical technologies. There is constant pressure on the ability of communication networks to satisfy the ever increasing needs of applications and services, and the winners have demonstrated that it is possible to boost further research, innovation and investment in areas that are critical for 5G deployment.

Our 5G Action Plan foresees that every EU Member State has to identify at least one major city to be "5G-enabled" by the end of 2020. The research results presented yesterday will be a crucial contribution to this end when they are taken to the market. Our ambition is that by 2025 all urban areas and major terrestrial transport paths have uninterrupted 5G coverage.

A decisive element of this roll-out strategy is to plan 5G trials now. The acceleration of the digitisation process in several key industrial sectors based on 5G connectivity, as well as the advent of novel business models, will require closer partnerships between the industrial, IT and telecommunication sectors. Industry has a leading role to plan for technological experiments taking place as early as 2017. It also needs to develop detailed roadmaps by March next year for the implementation of advanced pre-commercial trials to be promoted at EU level. These trials in key sectors must be launched in 2018 in order to ensure Europe's leadership in the global race for the introduction of 5G.

5G is more than a technology: it will provide a new digital mind-set when businesses and citizens realise what it can deliver. This is an opportunity for Europe to nurture a whole new ecosystem of companies, including start-ups and scale-ups. The European Commission will facilitate the implementation with an industry-led venture fund, which can be a key enabler to multiply the effect of new business models on our economy, similar to cloud computing that triggered ecosystems of apps.

However, in order to make the 5G revolution happen, there is still important work to be done on standards and spectrum, which needs to be tackled from an international cooperation perspective. We are aiming for a single unified global standard, as fragmentation would hurt both industry and consumers. Regarding spectrum, international negotiations are progressing and should reach a decision point in 2019. Some governments have decided to go faster, and in Europe we are moving towards identification of 5G pioneer bands, but we have to be careful that regional decisions do not make global harmonisation impossible and that interoperability is preserved.

A wide variety of actors has to be mobilised to make 5G a global success. We need initiatives like our 5G PPP, researchers, Member States, industry, venture funds, local and regional authorities - and of course our international partners - to contribute their share. I firmly believe that Europe brings added value to this process, and I am confident that the recent Commission initiatives will boost the introduction of 5G. It is of utmost importance that we now keep the ball rolling and use this momentum to move forward.