{"id":8798,"date":"2015-04-03T03:43:05","date_gmt":"2015-04-03T03:43:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ispreview.co.uk\/?p=8798"},"modified":"2015-03-23T13:42:10","modified_gmt":"2015-03-23T13:42:10","slug":"5g-mobile-is-in-danger-of-becoming-the-next-m2-bradley-tank","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ispreview.co.uk\/index.php\/2015\/04\/5g-mobile-is-in-danger-of-becoming-the-next-m2-bradley-tank.html","title":{"rendered":"5G Mobile is in Danger of Becoming the Next M2 Bradley Tank"},"content":{"rendered":"

Let\u2019s get something straight, the next generation of 5G<\/a> mobile technology probably won\u2019t bring about world peace, fix famine, cure cancer or save that baby from a burning building; at least not literally. It\u2019s a telecoms network upgrade, not superman. But in listening to some of the politicians speak you’d be forgiven for thinking that it could perform miracles.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

At present not a week seems to go by when somebody somewhere isn’t talking about 5G<\/a> technology, which has yet to even be defined and probably won’t be decided upon for another 2-3 years while the Research and Development phases of various competing projects continue (there are many and they’re all spread across the globe).<\/p>\n

After that phase is done then we probably won’t see a commercial roll-out until at least\u00a02020<\/strong>, which assumes that they can turn it into a practical and cost effective upgrade for existing Mobile Network Operators<\/strong> (this should be a key requirement).\u00a0So at some point somebody somewhere will need to make a decision about standards and that’s going to be tough with such an increasingly thick and convoluted soup of opinion and expectation already building around the service.<\/p>\n

The situation has arguably been made far more convoluted by the seemingly rabid interest of politicians, which somewhere along the lines have turned 5G<\/a> into a revolutionary technology, with huge capabilities, rather than a more natural evolutionary one. Not that this is a bad thing, but it’s all starting to remind us a bit of the troubled development cycle that sprang from the USA’s M2 Bradley<\/strong> fighting vehicle.<\/p>\n

The M2 Bradley is a light “tank<\/em>” (APC) designed for reconnaissance, manoeuvrability and troop transportation. It’s not a bad tank (modern incarnation), but its development cycle is also the stuff of legend, as comically depicted in the 1998 HBO film The Pentagon Wars<\/strong>. This turned what should have been a short and relatively inexpensive process, by military standards, into a monster.<\/p>\n

In the film the tank starts life as a simple armoured personnel carrier to replace the aging M113<\/strong>, but along the way a mix of political interference and military mismanagement creates a nightmare for the engineers who have to meet their ever rising expectations and demands.<\/p>\n

Over the course of many years and billions of $ the Bradley morphs from an APC to a tank, to a scout vehicle, to a hybrid of the two and various other things, while always having to make compromises in order to achieve the changing goals. The end result is a vehicle that’s not much good at anything, least of all its originally envisaged APC role. One of the best scenes from the film, which depicts this process of failure, is sampled below for your viewing pleasure.<\/p>\n