The Next Generation of 5G Mobile Technology Finally Gets a LOGO

You can almost hear the golf clapping. We might not have a solid standard yet or any live commercial networks but hay, at least the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) has finally decided on one thing, the LOGO for 5G. Now feel free to bask in its glory and retro green curvy bits.

Last year the 3GPP announced that the first official release of 5G specifications (Release-15) would surface by June 2018 (here) and the new logo is similarly designed to be accompany that. The announcement also states that the logo “will be used on the relevant 5G Phase 1 specifications in Release 15 (Complete by late 2018) and then the 5G Phase 2, Release 16 specifications – for completion in 2020.”

At present we still don’t have a clear standard for what 5G will become, although the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) has targeted a peak Mobile Broadband performance capability of 20Gbps (Gigabits per second) under the IMT-2020 designation (this reflects shared capacity between many users). That’s roughly 20 times faster than the original expectation for 4G (IMT-Advanced) services and most operators are still trying to reach that.

The 5G technology is expected to be able to work in existing Mobile spectrum bands below 6GHz, but it will also aim to harness high capacity data connectivity by utilising bands up to 100GHz (we’ve seen trials testing all sorts of bands, although 28GHz (here) and 73GHz have been quite popular). However such high frequencies will also require a more expensive, dense and generally complex network architecture.

Most people don’t expect the first commercial scale deployments to begin until 2020 and regulators around the world, such as Ofcom in the UK, are already working to identify the most viable radio spectrum bands and to then agree as much harmony in their future use with other countries as possible.

Despite this we do anticipate that some countries will start deploying early customer trials and pilots from sometime this year (example), although most operators won’t be able to progress to a full scale deployment until the spectrum and standards have been agreed.