5G Competition in Olympic Games
South Korea is planning to start the world’s first trial 5G service at the 2018 Pyeongchang Winter Olympics while Japan is looking to provide the world’s first commercial 5G service at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. China, on its part, is going to unveil its 5G-Advanced technology via the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics.
According to the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), 5G can be defined as a wireless broadband technology by which one million Internet of Things (IoT) devices are connected in an area of one square kilometers at a maximum rate of 20 Gbps and a minimum rate of 100 Mbps. The ITU is planning to complete the standardization of the technology for commercial services by 2020.
The South Korean Ministry of Science, ICT & Future Planning and the Pyeongchang Winter Olympics organizing committee are to demonstrate a variety of broadcasting equipment, holograms, virtual reality content and the like at the Winter Olympics while having 16,000 smartphones, 13,000 PCs, 3,500 WiFi spots and 1,500 table PCs simultaneously connected to one another to transmit and receive information and data in real time. To this end, a dedicated 5G network with a length of 1,391 km is set up, which is to include sub-networks for broadcasting, facility management, administrative services, etc.
In the meantime, the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications of Japan is moving ahead with a 5G commercialization project with 42 enterprises and private sector organizations such as NTT Docomo, KDDI, Sony and Sharp. China recently jumped into the race, too. Discussions for the development of 5G Advanced are in their early stage now and it is expected to provide higher levels of speed and power efficiency than 5G.