InsideSources

The next generation of wireless networks, 5G, will go far beyond speeding up your Netflix streams or immersing you in virtual reality on the go, according to wireless engineer and consultant Peter Rysavy, who talked with InsideSources to answer the question posed by average smartphone users to FCC commissioners: What is 5G, and what does it mean for the global mobile future?

Note: Responses have been edited for brevity and clarity.

If you asked the average smartphone user what 3 or 4G was, they probably wouldn’t be able to tell you. Can you explain what 5G is, and why it will be such a revolutionary leap forward?

It’s an entirely new wireless network platform, but it’ll coexist with previous generations in the same way that today’s 4G LTE network also supports 3G devices and 2G, which came out in the 1990s. 2G was the first digital network, 3G was the first broadband network and 4G made the first use of multiple smart antennas on transmitters and receivers, capable of bouncing off buildings and so forth — a way to become much more flexible in how we use spectrum. 4G is pretty good for our normal broadband applications, 5G is necessarily going to make it more efficient.

The goal with 5G is to accomplish two fundamental things: one is to make the radio much more efficient and responsive for new machine types of applications, or the internet of things (IoT). With 5G, the goal is to really address every kind of use case we can imagine for devices and machines connecting wirelessly. The other objective is to use smart antennas and advances in radio technology to access spectrum at very high frequency for the first time that were not previously practical for cellular systems. Those are bands that provide much more spectrum than we currently have in use today. Exploiting those bands is going to require entirely new architecture, and I don’t know if we have fully figured out business models to support them.

The expansion of the internet of things including ultra-reliable communications being able to support autonomous vehicles and smart cities, those types of applications — that’s one of the foundational elements. The other is to exploit these new bands to massively increase capacity and throughput performance. So that really is what 5G is.

 

In a speech earlier this summer FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler said 5G is going to usher in the mobile advent of technology like augmented and virtual reality, ultra-high definition 4K video, etc. with greater speed and less latency, but it sounds like your definition is looking beyond just the average consumer’s smartphone applications.

Those enhanced mobile broadband applications — that’s really doing what we can today with LTE, but just doing it 10 to 100 times faster. Now with lower latency, you don’t necessarily get everything at the same time. If you’re trying to provide somebody a reliable, continuous 25 megabit-per-second ultra-high definition video stream, whether that arrives at your handset a millisecond after it’s sent or 100 milliseconds after it’s sent doesn’t really matter, you’re never going to notice a difference. The ultra-low latency is something you need for ultra-reliable, low-latency communications, and that’s for addressing real-time automation.

 

So 4G can already handle VR and 4K, 5G will just do it better, but the real revolutionary technology made possible by 5G will be things like autonomous vehicles, smart cities and IoT.

Yeah, I think that’s where you’re going to potentially see the real growth. And that’s what motivates carriers, because for just general mobile broadband they’re not really going to be able to charge anybody more per month, we really have reached the peak of average revenue per user per month. Just because it’s faster doesn’t mean you can charge people more. Because the capacity is higher, more people will be able to cut the cord. Mobile broadband will become the only broadband that a lot of people need. It’s not going to make coaxial or fiber go away, and I really don’t see that growing revenue that much for carriers.

It’s really about the massive deployment of IoT. The International Telecommunications Union’s objective is for 5G to support one million devices per square kilometer, whereas the practical limit for 4G is only one-tenth that amount.

 

I’ve heard 2020 often mentioned as a general timeline to deploy 5G. When will we start to see some of the applications you’re describing?

That depends on the business approach operators take. Millimeter wave frequencies (those in the upper spectrum bands 5G will depend on) will be restricted to small cell architecture (necessary to continually bounce the otherwise weak millimeter waves to their destination). Those will require deployment of tens of thousands, if not eventually hundreds of thousands and millions of small cells to really reap the benefits across large percentages of the population.

IoT is being designed to require very low data payloads, in return 5G radio will be able to run extremely efficiently from an energy perspective, which will extend battery life. People are looking at a battery lasting ten years or more. If you can run for 10 years on a battery and sell a modem for $2 or $5 dollars, then suddenly all kinds of applications become practical that were not in the past.

Those types of devices will operate at lower cellular bands already in use. Carriers could take those bands, roll out 5G nationwide without that many cell sites as an underlay and emphasize IoT, they could start rolling that out pretty close to 2020. The question is a business one — technically they could do that, but will they be able to get enough revenue from these new IoT applications to justify that investment.

5G from a consumer point of view will provide the biggest bang for the buck for consumers in small cells, but that’s not going to happen until the mid-2020s on any widespread basis. For IoT, you can do that on existing bands, and they may — the FCC’s current broadcast incentive auction does provide an opportunity for carriers to say, ‘Look, we’ve done 5G nationally, and we’re ready to go on all these IoT applications.’ Nobody has really announced what their exact plans are.

 

Are regulatory agencies like the FCC doing enough to encourage 5G deployment?

The FCC is moving forward, I think, well with 5G. I think the FCC is showing pretty good innovation, forward thinking and reasonable aggressiveness in rolling out new spectrum. As far as things I’m concerned about, I think they’re overly enthusiastic about spectrum sharing. The approach they’re using is massively complex and extremely ambitious. There are some concerns they’ll want to use the same approach in the millimeter wave band before it’s ready for prime time. Another is that their spectrum road map doesn’t provide the long-term view carriers need for investment. Every auction is like an experiment and different from those in the past, and if you asked for a 10-year roadmap, you wouldn’t get one.

Unlicensed spectrum is great for WiFi and local area coverage, but it makes no sense at all for wide area coverage. And yet there’s still this thinking, heavily influenced by Silicon Valley, that unlicensed will solve all of our problems, when in reality you just can’t build large scale, wide area commercial networks based on unlicensed frequencies. Any operator of such a network is just not going to know what the interference situation is going to be, so who’s going to invest billions of dollars in any network when you don’t know how well it’s going to work? It’s just not going to happen.

 

What impact do you think the FCC’s net neutrality order will have on 5G, now that wireless networks are subject to the same rules as wired?

The ultra-reliable, low-latency communications unique to 5G we talked about can only be achieved by prioritizing traffic. Right now, a literal interpretation of network neutrality is that you are not allowed to prioritize traffic. So if I wanted to send those bits to a car that’s driving around a corner telling it that there’s a pedestrian in the road and that car is going to kill that pedestrian, those bits have to be treated with the same priority as somebody’s YouTube or Netflix stream of Grey’s Anatomy. That’s just ridiculous, simpleminded and doesn’t achieve any engineering-driven result that makes sense.

And the crazy thing is, that could be 1 percent of the traffic. If you wanted to expedite the bits for that autonomous vehicle application, that video user wouldn’t even notice, because they’re the one consuming gigabytes of data. Those low-latency communications might not be consuming anything in comparison. And you could expedite those bits in a way that has no negative impact on other users. That’s the irony of it — people think that it’s a zero-sum game, that if you expedite one person, if one person wins, then another person has to lose. That’s not how it works, you can actually have both parties win just through intelligent traffic management.

I understand you don’t want anti-competitive behavior — an operator’s video stream shouldn’t get preferential treatment over a third-party video stream, that’s fine. Regulate that, but don’t eliminate millions of applications that could benefit from these technologies. Traffic inherently doesn’t have equal priority.

You asked why carriers wouldn’t roll out 5G aggressively for IoT — this could be one reason. If you’re not going to get more revenue from your broadband capabilities, and if the new revenue is from IoT, automation, autonomous driving and all these cool new capabilities, if that’s where the new revenue is, that’s how you justify your investment. But if the policy doesn’t support that, then that undermines the investment.

I think in that regard, the FCC has completely failed. I think they’ve basically given in to politics instead of engineering. It’s not that the FCC doesn’t understand this, the problem is net neutrality just became such a public cause driven by “click to this” campaigns and was dealt with at such a superficial level that we never had an intelligent discussion of it.

 

In August, Wheeler said ongoing, cybersecurity would be a first consideration for the FCC in building new networks. Does the enhanced capability promised by 5G bring enhanced danger along with it to areas like data privacy or infrastructure security?

There aren’t any known major security failings in 4G technology, LTE has stood up pretty well. But we also know over time, hackers just become smarter and their means of defeating things become more powerful. The goals for 5G are to do better than 4G, and so the areas that come into the security equation include subscriber authentication and user privacy as far as encryption of the radio link — that we have in 4G.

Some of the things we don’t have that could be put into 5G are protection against denial of service attacks. For example, if you have a botnet that infected millions of cellphones and they wanted to suddenly bring down a network through malicious behavior, that could be the type of thing you could protect against better in 5G.

There’s stuff that’s specific to the radio. Yes, with 4G, we have good encryption of the link, with 5G, it can be that much better. We could have mutual authentication between the device and network. Right now, a device can easily think it’s connecting to a network, but it’s not if it’s connecting to something like a Stingray device or somebody’s malicious network. People are looking at whether that can be improved.

A lot of operators are offering virtual private networks for a lot of enterprise applications, giving users the ability to access private information from their device over a secure, private connection that can’t be hacked into rather than going over the internet like you and I do to get to our mail servers. So there are layers in network connectivity options that offer more security than operators have today, which I think will happen with 5G.

 

You mentioned the FCC’s ongoing broadcast incentive auction earlier. The FCC has touted the auction as a big part of encouraging the deployment of 5G. Since the first round of bidding by wireless carriers concluded last month at just over $20 billion — well below the agency’s target of more than $80 billion — some have suggested carriers exaggerated claims about running out of spectrum. How important is repurposed broadcast spectrum to 5G?

The concern of running out of spectrum is legitimate. It doesn’t take a very complicated mathematical analysis to show that any wireless network has extremely finite capacity. If you do the math, just three of four users streaming Netflix in high definition consume the entire capacity of a cell sector, which could be a number of blocks in a city. The average amount of data consumed by each user every month keeps going up, and will keep going up, there’s no question.

You can solve capacity by more cell sites, more spectrum or better technology, but LTE is already running about as efficiently as you can. Some of the ways of really improving efficiency aren’t practical until you get to really high frequencies, such as millimeter wave.

You wouldn’t have had operators spend $40 billion-plus in the recent AWS-3 spectrum auction unless there was a need for spectrum. That is just conclusive proof. The disconnect is that carriers need spectrum for capacity — the 600 megahertz band (spectrum currently being auctioned) is a coverage band, it’s not a capacity band.

600 MHz is a frequency you want when you want to provide broad coverage and deploy the smallest number of cells possible to get a national footprint. It’s not what you want to deploy in an urban area to augment capacity, and I think a lot of the carriers — AT&T and Verizon — they already have a decent chunk of spectrum in the 700s, so some 600 MHz might be good for them because then they could get some new spectrum and do a national underlay for 5G, but that spectrum doesn’t really address the need for capacity. And I think maybe that’s why you’re not seeing as much initial enthusiasm or as many billions of dollars being put forth in this forward round of the incentive auction. It’s kind of a myth that everybody wants low-band spectrum.

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Before mobile carriers can offer subscribers download speeds 10 to 100 times faster on future 5G networks, they’ll have to prove to the Federal Communications Commission the next generation of wireless networks is cyber secure.

The FCC published in the Federal Register this week proposed rules to guide wireless carriers in the deployment of 5G, approved unanimously during an agency vote in July. As Fedscoop noted Wednesday, those rules set basic cybersecurity security standards for 5G networks.

According to the rules, any carrier seeking licenses for high-band 5G spectrum “is required to submit to the commission a statement describing its network security plans and related information, which shall be signed by a senior executive within the licensee’s organization with personal knowledge of the security plans and practices within the licensee’s organization.”

The plan must include “a high-level, general description” of how the carrier will safeguard on-demand network availability and subscriber data from unauthorized access, disclosure, modification or destruction across virtually the entire network; from handsets to networks, devices inside the network to each other, the carrier’s network to another carrier’s network, and handset to handset “with respect to telephone voice and messaging services.”

Carriers must also detail their “anticipated approach to assessing and mitigating cyber risk induced by the presence of multiple participants in the band” and “cybersecurity standards and practices to be employed, whether industry-recognized or related to some other identifiable approach.”

Competing 5G providers will have to demonstrate they can coordinate their cybersecurity efforts by safeguarding the communications of mobile devices not even under their control. The agency also wants to see providers work with the cybersecurity industry at large, incorporate automated threat-detection systems and share data about threats with each other, saying plans “should include comment on machine-to-machine threat information sharing.”

Carriers will have three years after acquiring their 5G licenses to detail their plans, which must be submitted no later than six months before they plan to deploy their networks to the public. Those seeking to comment on the rules will have until Sept. 30, with reply comments due on Halloween.

The proposed standards come almost two weeks after FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler said that ongoing, cybersecurity will be one of the first regulatory considerations in the next generation of networks.

“That’s why, in our new 5G rules we have – for the first time – required that new network design must deal with cyber from the outset,” Wheeler said in a speech at an Aspen Institute policy conference. “In this new network that will drive the 21st century, cybersecurity will be a forethought, not an afterthought.”

Wheeler said the FCC would avoid issuing specific regulations “thus allowing the technology to evolve as rapidly as possible … while maintaining the ability to step in with regulation if necessary.”

The agency’s rules were built on the cybersecurity framework set down by the National Institute of Standards and Technology — the same guidelines federal agencies and commercial companies look to for establishing best practices in information security.

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Wireless lobbyists and consumer groups, recently at odds over the Federal Communications Commission’s net neutrality rules, have joined forces to push the FCC to approve sharing airwaves for 5G networks.

The Competitive Carriers Association, which includes T-Mobile among its members, and CTIA, whose members include AT&T and Verizon, filed comments with the FCC alongside digital consumer advocacy groups Public Knowledge and New America’s Open Technology Institute this summer urging the commission to approve a request by Ligado Networks to share spectrum used by GPS devices to roll out a 5G cell network.

“[T]he commission should initiate a rulemaking to consider making the 1675-1680 MHz band available via auction for shared commercial use, and to adopt associated service and auction rules,” CTIA said in comments to the FCC. “Repurposing this band for shared commercial use is one more step the commission can take to help accommodate the explosive growth in demand for mobile broadband.”

Public Knowledge and New America said the proposal would bring more competition to the wireless market — a win for consumers.

“In a mobile broadband marketplace which has continued to consolidate over the intervening years, the public interest benefits of additional competition, whether wholesale or direct to consumers, are more palpable than ever,” both groups told the FCC in a joint filing. “[P]ublic interest advocates have explained that additional competition in the mobile broadband space would enable a new ecosystem of hardware, software, and applications, bring much needed competition to a relatively uncompetitive marketplace, and foster the potential for innovation, increased consumer welfare, and job creation.”

Ligado asked the FCC in May to use 40 megahertz of its spectrum to launch a ground-based wireless network, which it would combine with its satellite-based communications system to launch a 5G cellular network.

“By deploying 40 megahertz of smart capacity on midband spectrum, we can create a model of at least a partial 5G network — a next-generation, hybrid satellite-terrestrial network — that will enable 5G use cases and mobile applications that require ultra-reliable, highly secure and pervasive connectivity,” Ligado president and CEO Doug Smith wrote in a May blog post.

Ligado operates a satellite communications network for emergency response, remote monitoring and “other mission-critical applications” for government and industry clients. The company is asking the FCC to modify some licenses of its mid-band spectrum in the 1.6 gigahertz band, near frequencies used by GPS devices, for shared use.

While cellular networks typically operate on low-band spectrum where it’s easiest for signals to travel far distances, carriers expect to run out of much of that spectrum in the next five years as more Americans adopt smartphones to use bandwidth-heavy applications like video streaming.

To keep up with demand carriers including AT&T, Verizon and others are already working on technology to make use of mid and high-band spectrum, where signals weaken, and where carriers plan to use new technology to harness the upper bands to send communications that only have to travel shorter distances.

Though the FCC approved a plan in August to help carriers deploy 5G networks 10 to 100 times faster than today’s 4G LTE, the agency previously denied a similar request by Ligado predecessor LightSquared to launch a 4G service with Sprint, citing concerns it would interfere with GPS devices that operate in the middle bands.

The denial sent LightSquared into bankruptcy in 2012, from which it emerged late last year. In December the company said it successfully worked out shared use agreements with GPS providers Garmin, Trimble Navigation and Deere & Co. to dispel any fears of interference, and that could eventually free up more than 50 MHz of spectrum for cellular use.

The company rebranded itself as Ligado in February. In its new plan pitched to the FCC in May, the company assured the Federal Aviation Administration it would maintain power levels that won’t interfere with air traffic. Ligado also said it would support an FCC auction of spectrum adjacent to its mid-band spectrum, under the condition the winning bidder pays for “high-speed Internet access and cloud-based distribution of weather data” for academics and non-profits, and that it address interference concerns expressed by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. NOAA transmits data in the middle bands.

“While moving this spectrum forward toward the future, Ligado will also ensure that its current users, both licensed and those ‘listening in,’ are not harmed,” Ligado told the FCC in August. “If Ligado prevails at auction, it will meet all FCC requirements imposed on the licensee in connection with the band, will ensure that NOAA’s operations are protected, and will make sure that non-NOAA users continue to enjoy access to the NOAA data they currently use.”

FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler’s 5G plan adopted in July asks for additional comments on approving the use of more high-band spectrum and spectrum sharing.

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The Federal Communications Commission voted Thursday to approve the first allocation of 5G airwaves for auction to wireless providers like AT&T and Verizon, already conducting tests to deploy wireless speeds 10 to 100 times faster than 4G LTE by 2020.

“I do believe this is one of, if not the, most important decision this agency will make this year,” FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler repeated of his Spectrum Frontiers Order approved in a rare unanimous vote by all five commissioners during the FCC’s July open meeting.

The plan sets aside nearly 11 Gigahertz of high-band spectrum, including 3.85 GHz of licensed and 7 GHz of unlicensed airwaves for 5G, making the U.S. the first globally to begin taking advantage of such high-band spectrum previously unusable due to the limits of antenna technology.

The higher bands, though tougher to access, boast wider bandwidth that could eventually increase wireless speeds up to 100 times what they are today, and enable mobile downloads of high definition 4K video, virtual reality and technology unimagined in city infrastructure and the internet of things.

“5G will enable killer applications yet to be imagined,” Wheeler said, adding he expects the first commercial deployments of 5G to take place as soon as 2020.

In addition to the spectrum approved in the 28 GHz, 37 GHz, and 39 GHz licensed bands, and new unlicensed band at 64-71 GHz, the FCC adopted a Further Notice of Proposed Rulemaking to approve another 18 GHz of high-band spectrum and seeks comment on making more spectrum available for sharing.

Democratic Commissioner Mignon Clyburn summed up the feelings of most Americans during the meeting when she jokingly asked Wheeler “just what is 5G?” (see our explanation here), and added she was “willing to bet that your answer to the question … will be different from the person sitting next to you.”

“What we can agree is that the next wireless revolution promises to change the way we live, interact, and engage with our communities,” Clyburn said.

Though all acknowledged the importance of the commission’s action Thursday, the FCC’s third Democrat, Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel, pointed out the hard work of building the infrastructure to harness the weak and easily fragmented signals in the upper bands is only starting.

“Though spectrum gets all the glory, the ground matters as much as the skies,” Rosenworcel said. “We need policies to promote small cells — they’re a big thing.”

Small cell networks will feature many more and smaller cell sites for bouncing and capturing the high-frequency millimeter waves harnessed in the upper bands, which have a difficult time moving through objects like the walls of a building.

Rosenworcel exhorted the commission to put incentives in place for encouraging state and local governments to build out 5G infrastructure, and during a press conference with reporters after the meeting Wheeler said the commission will do more to speed up cell tower site construction approval.

He added the FCC’s divisive pending business broadband rules will help by ensuring larger carriers like AT&T and Verizon charge affordable rates to smaller carriers like Sprint and T-Mobile for backhaul — the term used for internet data transmissions to cell towers, which facilitate bandwidth-heavy services like mobile video streaming.

In a less agreeable though still unanimous vote, the commission voted to approve standards voice providers must meet as they transition from traditional copper-based networks to an Internet Protocol (IP) framework — an effort aimed at ensuring the millions of consumers still receiving service on copper networks don’t suffer any loss in service.

Under the standards providers must offer the same network performance, coverage and services including access to 911, cybersecurity, people with disabilities, home security systems, medical monitoring devices, credit card readers and fax machines.

“While the test sets clear, achievable benchmarks, it also provides flexibility by recognizing that a shift from traditional networks to new technologies will never be a purely apples-to-apples comparison,” the FCC said in a statement after the meeting. “The test is voluntary for carriers. Requests for discontinuance can also be reviewed through the FCC’s normal adjudicatory channels.”

Republican Commissioners Michael O’Rielly and Ajit Pai said as more Americans embrace new technology, there’s little need for the commission to encourage hesitation among providers in transitioning to IP networks.

“Much like the final season of Lost, that recent James Patterson novel, and every Super Bowl halftime show since Janet Jackson, there’s just not that much new being revealed,” Pai said of the order, adding that like recent iterations of famed franchises like Terminator and and Rocky, “this film doesn’t live up to the trailer.”

Harold Feld, senior vice president of leading pro-net neutrality group Public Knowledge, said the federal government has an important role to play ensuring no Americans are left behind as the U.S. embraces what’s come to be called the “tech transition.”

“We all agree that the next administration will have a huge role to play in facilitating this transition,” Feld said. “As the largest single user of telecommunications services, the federal government must be a leader, not a laggard, in embracing our communications infrastructure upgrade.”

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The Federal Communications Commission is poised to pave the way for wireless carriers to deploy the next generation of mobile networks — 5G — the technology that could boost wireless speeds up too 100 times faster than today, and kickstart the broad adoption of virtual reality (VR) and the internet of things (IoT).

Commissioners are expected to approve Chairman Tom Wheeler’s Spectrum Frontiers Order during the FCC’s monthly open meeting Thursday, setting aside high-band spectrum for wireless carriers in the 28, 37 and 39 Gigahertz bands for licensed use, and putting the U.S. first on the world map of 5G.

“The decision we make Thursday could actually be the most important decision this commission makes this year,” Wheeler told members of Congress during an FCC oversight hearing Tuesday.

The increase in speed will at minimum be 10 times faster than 4G LTE, boasting speeds resembling those carried on fiber and “responsiveness less than one-thousandth of a second, which enables real-time communication; and network capacity multiples of what is available today,” Wheeler added.

While the pace of technology previously rendered the high-band spectrum in the plan unusable, new technologies including high-frequency millimeter wave bands and small cell networks will allow carriers to make use of the bands, which have more than five times the space of lower bands used in 4G.

While typical low-band spectrum is 5 to 10 MHz in width, 5G blocks will be more like 200 MHz across, and provide for more and faster backhaul carrying internet data to cell towers.

The additional space will increase speeds from the current average of 10 to 20 Megabits per second to 100 Mbps to 1 Gigabit, drastically boosting download speeds for streaming high definition 4K video and enabling new tech like VR. It’ll further expand the processing power of the cloud to “enable smart-city energy grid and water systems, immersive education and entertainment, and, most importantly, new applications yet to be imagined,” Wheeler said Tuesday.

In his announcement of the plan in June, the chairman said it’ll seek comments on opening up other high-frequency bands, propose making a 14 gigahertz unlicensed spectrum band for shared use and seek rules for spectrum sharing between satellite, mobile and federal entities.

Though the FCC’s move marks a bold step in the right direction by the federal government, the broad deployment of 5G will require significantly more work by state and local governments before its full potential can be realized, according to Richard Adler, a fellow at the Palo Alto-based research non-profit Institute for the Future.

While the benefits of 5G could be “immeasurable” according to Adler, they’ll require far more infrastructure to implement them across multiple sectors of the economy, “including healthcare, education, manufacturing, energy, agriculture, hospitality, transportation, among others.”

“One of the most distinctive challenges of building out 5G networks will involve ‘densifying’ existing networks by deploying both additional towers, and an unprecedented number of smaller cells, including multiple cells within a single building or, potentially, a single room,” Adler told reporters during a conference call Tuesday. “This will require a great deal of public-private cooperation.”

Small cell networks are required to catch and bounce high-band frequencies, typically weak when not moving in a straight lines.

Adler added backhaul access, spectrum sharing and local permitting for building cell tower sites as additional hurdles policy makers must tackle to maximize 5G.

Wheeler’s plan echoes the need for spectrum sharing and in June, he said the commission already sped up its process for approving applications for tower site construction.

With regard to backhaul, the chairman said the FCC’s pending proposal to rewrite the rules for business broadband will ensure providers get the capability they need at an affordable price.

“These backhaul connections can be as much as 30 percent of the cost of operating a wireless network,” Wheeler said. “And with the additional sites required to support use of the millimeter wave spectrum, that percentage is likely to increase, to as much as 50 percent.”

Despite the hurdles, Adler is optimistic.

“Finding solutions to this tapestry of challenges is a knotty problem, to be sure. But the payoffs that will come from 5G connectivity are immeasurable,” he said. “And 5G networks will dramatically expand the Internet of Things, allowing all sorts of companies and organizations to connect with and coordinate vast networks of devices on which their operations depend.”

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Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler said it was “damn important” the U.S. lead the world in deploying the next generation of wireless networks Monday, and announced a new proposal he’ll bring before the FCC in July to expand 5G for everything from virtual reality to the Internet of Things.

During a speech at the National Press Club Monday, Wheeler said he’ll circulate his “Spectrum Frontiers” plan for boosting 5G deployment to his fellow commissioners Thursday, and schedule a vote on the proposal to open up high-band spectrum for 5G for the FCC’s July 15 open meeting.

“If the commission approves my proposal next month, the United States will be the first country in the world to open up high-band spectrum for 5G networks and applications,” Wheeler said. “And that’s damn important because it means U.S. companies will be first out of the gate.”

Wheeler opened the speech by describing how months ago, he helmed an excavator in Texas digging up dirt — all while wearing a suit inside the offices of the FCC in Washington, D.C. He said the feat was made possible by VR, which, like the Internet of Things, autonomous vehicles and technology we haven’t even imagined yet, will only be possible if the FCC prepares the way for 5G.

“Granted, remotely digging dirt in Dallas probably isn’t high on the list of transformational advancements that will define the 21st century,” the chairman said.

“But what if you replace the heavy machinery with a scalpel so a world-class surgeon can move from hospital to hospital without leaving her own surgery suite?” he continued. “Or how about students sitting in a classroom taking a virtual tour inside the human body? Or something I did last week at Stanford’s VR lab where I stood next to the Stanford quarterback as play after play developed, and I read the defense and made split-second decisions?”

Those will require wireless speeds “10 to 100 times faster than today,” according to the chairman, with far more high-band spectrum than is currently available.

Finding it will mean utilizing high-frequency millimeter wave bands in the multi-gigabits per-second range (essentially the same as a high-speed wired fiber connection), with latency reduced to the millisecond range across varying distances, allowing for wireless 4K video and virtual reality streaming.

That technology will require more infrastructure making use of small cell networks to catch and bounce high-band frequencies — typically weak when not moving in a straight lines — and more spectrum sharing.

Wheeler explained while typical blocks of licensed low-band spectrum are usually 5 to 10 MHz in width, 5G blocks will be more like 200 MHz, and provide for more and faster backhaul carrying internet data to cell towers.

The July plan will seek comments on opening up other high-frequency bands, propose making a 14 gigahertz unlicensed spectrum band for shared use and seek rules for spectrum sharing between satellite, mobile and federal entities.

Wheeler added the commission has already sped its process for approving applications to build tower sites, and said his pending proposal for new rules over the high-capacity business internet market will guarantee wireless providers have access to the backhaul they need for 5G at an affordable price.

“These backhaul connections can be as much as 30 percent of the cost of operating a wireless network,” Wheeler said. “And with the additional sites required to support use of the millimeter wave spectrum, that percentage is likely to increase, to as much as 50 percent.”

Many view the business broadband rules as an outgrowth of the agency’s net neutrality rules upheld in a federal appeals court last week, aimed at giving the FCC the power to regulate the rates larger providers like Verizon and AT&T charge smaller providers like Sprint to lease parts of their networks.

“Competition in the supply of backhaul remains limited, and that can translate into higher prices for wireless networks and then higher prices for consumers,” he said. “Lack of competition doesn’t just hurt the deployment of wireless networks today, it threatens as well to delay the buildout of 5G networks with its demand for many, many more backhaul connections to many, many more antennae.”

An industry study found Wheeler’s proposed business broadband rules could delay deployment of next-gen networks, costing billions in investment and thousands of jobs.

Wheeler said the agency will vote on the new business broadband rules before the end of the year.

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Verizon has partnered with some of the biggest names in tech hardware manufacturing to start testing 5G connectivity in the real world, where multi-gigabit wireless download speeds will power high-bandwidth services like 4K video streaming, gaming and the future world of connected devices.

The company announced at Barcelona’s Mobile World Congress Monday it has begun 5G trials in Euless, Texas, Hillsboro, Oregon, and Basking Ridge, Bridgewater and Piscataway New Jersey, where Verizon beat AT&T, the second largest provider in the U.S., to be the first one to test 5G at home.

“Verizon continues to accelerate innovation around 5G technology by working closely with our partners,” Verizon’s senior vice president of technology strategy and planning Ed Chan said Monday. “We were the first to launch 4G nationwide. With 5G, we will again drive innovation across the technology landscape to bring new solutions to market for our customers.”

“Our field technical trials are proving that 5G is here and ready to be commercialized,” he continued, “and we’ve constructed several test beds that represent real-world environments.”

While the “real world” testing described in a Verizon’s announcement only extends to the backyard of the nation’s largest wireless carrier, the tests themselves demonstrate the next great leap in wireless connectivity will power the next generation of connected devices everywhere from moving cars to inside homes and buildings.

Though still a ways off in development and deployment, the next step beyond 4G Long Term Evolution (LTE), which allows for the delivery of millions of bits per second, could be up to 1,000 times faster with four times more global coverage, and allow for download speeds of 10 gigabits-per-second for at least 100 billion devices. According to Cisco, such coverage and connectivity will be necessary to keep up with the 24.3 exabytes per month of global data traffic expected by 2019.

Using fixed wireless and mobile 5G trial equipment, the company has successfully tested 5G connectivity in multiple real-world scenarios, including through the use of high-frequency millimeter wave bands to generate connectivity in the multi-gigabits per-second range (essentially the same as a high-speed wired fiber connection), with latency reduced to the millisecond range across varying of distances, allowing for wireless 4K video and virtual reality streaming.

The wireless giant has joined with tech and telecommunications firms across the industry including, Apple, Cisco, Ericsson, Intel, LG, Nokia, Samsung, and Qualcomm, who together along with venture capital groups across the U.S. form the Verizon 5G Technology Forum, the goal of which is to drive the development of technological standards and fundamentals for 5G.

Verizon has also partnered with international telecommunications providers KT, NTT DOCOMO and SK Telecom to form the 5G Open Trial Specification Alliance, an effort aimed at setting global testing specifications for 5G and encourage “a common, extendable platform for different 5G trial activity” and “promoting a more inclusive, open, and collaborative approach to the development of 5G trial networks.”

While that testing has so far been limited to controlled indoor trials and a slow-moving van full of equipment acting as a 5G device, Verizon says select customers will by trying out the technology on commercial devices by next year.

“Radically increased capacity enables a new generation of applications, especially those that rely on video,” AEI visiting fellow Richard Bennett wrote in an op-ed for InsideSources Monday. “Ultra-high speed mobile video networks will enable drones, smart cars, immersive gaming, and ‘virtual reality’ entertainment experiences that blur the lines between imagination and reality.”

Congress and the Federal Communications Commission are working to do their part in ensuring the fast rollout of nationwide 5G, including through legislation designed to free up underused spectrum from the federal government and the FCC’s upcoming incentive auction.

“I had a conversation with the CEO of one of the major companies a couple of weeks ago, and he said … that by 2020 … even if they have 90 percent of their traffic offloaded onto WiFi and other networks, he’s still going to be out of spectrum. And this is a company that has a lot of spectrum,” FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler said last year while predicting success at the auction, where television broadcasters will sell airwaves back to the FCC for auction to wireless providers.

“We’re the world leader in 4G,” Wheeler said. “We’re going to maintain that in 5G.”

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