On the second day of the world's biggest annual telecom event, the hype was all about developing and introducing the world's first 5G services, which operators said could be expected as early as 2018.
The Mobile World Congress, taking place in Barcelona, held discussions on 5G or fifth generation technology yesterday, where the world's wireless industry leaders debated on the likelihood of developing the next evolutionary step of mobile telecom technology by 2020.
There were, however, criticisms about the targeted deadline – with some of the movers and shakers of the industry saying more time and effort needed to be put into developing 5G technology – considering the fact that 4G was only recently introduced in many European and developed countries and 3G was also relatively new to most developing countries.
Even before the start of the Mobile World Congress, the 5G hype had been created by different mobile phone makers and operators – Nokia Networks, Huawei, Ericsson and KT Corporation – who fixed 2020 as the projected target for launching their respective 5G services.
But another major global brand – Orange Telecom – said introducing 5G would need more time as they had just launched 4G in Europe.
Korea's KT Corporation, however, is aiming to introduce 5G at the 2018 Winter Olympics – set to take place in South Korea's PyeongChang.
“The world will find the [5G] feature in that Olympics,” Dr Chang-Gyu Hwang, chairman and CEO of KT Corporation, said in a discussion at the Mobile World Congress yesterday.
“5G is the next generation network which can give us connectivity with the capacity of a high volume of data,” he said.
However, Stéphane Richard, chairman and CEO of Orange, said: “It is not wise to change the switch and technology so frequently; time perspective is very important here.”
His views were countered by Steve Mollenkopf, CEO of telecom giant Qualcomm Incorporated, who said 2G was introduced in 1990, 3G in 2000, and 4G came in 2010; so 5G could be launched by 2020.
Describing the benefits of 5G, Ken Hu, deputy chairman and rotating CEO of Huawei, said to download an 8GB movie using 3G takes 70 minutes, with 4G it takes 7 minutes, and with 5G it will take only 6 seconds.