The deployment of 4G is just finished as the 5G knocks on the door! It has to be said that for the past ten years, the use of mobile telephony has evolved, under the twin impetus of the ever-increasing needs in terms of bandwidth and mobility; so that the 4G is already out of breath. What technical answers has 3GPP, the GSM standardization body, imagined to make the future 5G what the public expects of it? Does it have a durable technical solution? Able to bring very high speed internet to all? And everywhere and all the time?
At the beginning of GSM, in the 90s, the data transmission service, or "data", was considered auxiliary. The first standards (1G, 2G) paid only marginal attention, limiting the bit rates to what modems of the time provided (9.6 kbps, fax). It was only from 3G that data transmission began to grab the attention of experts - there was nothing left to gain on the voice side. With 4G and its "futuristic" OFDM modulation, ETSI (the standardization body of the time) probably thought it had developed a stable and sustainable technical solution.
Las. It was not counting on the explosion of demand. 4G has given rise to a qualitative leap in terms of throughput, and has favored the emergence of new uses that themselves generate new needs. Until then, not surprisingly: all this had already happened in the field of fixed links. But several factors, which ETSI had not seen come, were added to this simple technological evolution.
