“It’s been a crazy, intense year.” In any other time, that assessment, delivered by Ericsson North America President and CEO Niklas Heuveldop, might seem like an exaggeration. But this is 2020. He sat down virtually with WIRED Editor in chief Nicholas Thompson to talk about how 2020 was a year in 5G innovation and what’s ahead in the US for this vital technology.
Ericsson recognized very quickly the potential impact of the novel coronavirus and in early February was one of the first companies to pull out of the GSMA Mobile World Congress Barcelona 2020. The largest event in the telecom industry was canceled a few days later. “Following Barcelona, we rapidly came to realize how bad the situation really was,” Heuveldop recalled. “It didn’t take many more weeks for all hell to break loose.”
In a matter of days, the company shifted 85,000 employees worldwide to work from home. (Some 85 percent of the workforce is still remote, Heuveldop said.)
This happened just as Ericsson was preparing to open its first US smart factory for 5G tech. Using virtual and augmented reality headsets, the company trained its American workers remotely from its operation in Estonia, more than 5,000 miles away. By early March, new base stations for millimeter-wave 5G were rolling off the line in Lewisville, Texas, and on their way to wireless carriers across the US.
Asked by Thompson to describe the progress toward universal 5G deployment in the US, Heuveldop replied that, while the US was first out of the gate across all bands of the spectrum, nationwide coverage remains chiefly in the less-robust low band, as opposed to the mid-band or high band, called millimeter wave. “What’s unique with 5G is the throughput, the number of devices you can have in a square mile, and of course the latency—the responsiveness of the network,” he said. “To get to the really high performance of 5G, you need to be in the mid-band or ideally in the millimeter wave.”
He noted that the US has fallen behind the rest of the world in 5G for a simple reason: lack of mid-band spectrum. The nation leads in millimeter wave bands, where Ericsson’s wireless carrier customers “have been very aggressive in rolling out,” he said, though their efforts have been hampered by complex zoning and permitting requirements. The company built its factory in Lewisville to be closer to those customers, betting that the more compact designs of its millimeter wave radio products will help meet zoning and other regulatory concerns.
In August the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) auctioned licenses to 3.5 GHz spectrum from its Citizens Broadband Radio Service (CBRS), and its C-band auction scheduled for early December will cover the 3.7–3.98 GHz band. Next year the FCC and Department of Defense plan to auction more. “We see a lot of interest among our customers to secure that precious mid-band spectrum,” Heuveldop said, “but it’s going to take time to bring that into commercial use.”
As carriers take control of more spectrum, building out a ubiquitous intelligent network platform presents the next big challenge for Ericsson and the rest of the industry. “How do we make sure that this incredible network platform is properly exposed to multiple developer ecosystems,” asked Heuveldop, “so that entrepreneurs—innovators—can then create the next generation of Ubers, Airbnbs, and Netflixes on top of that network platform?”
Ericsson has carved out a role as a matchmaker of sorts. “We do a lot of work with industries in our different experimentation labs,” he said. “We have D-15 in Silicon Valley, for instance, where we invite industrial players and service providers to work with hyperscalers to figure out how we bring all of this together.” The company took this role in earlier mobile technologies, but with 5G Heuveldop sees the potential for all of these players to collaborate more symbiotically from the beginning. Where it goes from there is difficult to forecast at this early stage.
WIRED’s Thompson brought the conversation back to the present moment, asking whether the nation’s inequities in broadband access in the face of Covid-19—in which lack of internet in some communities meant that children couldn’t go to school and people couldn’t get healthcare through telemedicine—made Ericsson turn its focus back to the low band of the 5G spectrum.
The answer was yes. “Connectivity is one part of it, availability of devices another part, and then affordability, of course, is an equally if not more important question,” Heuveldop responded. Ericsson has been working with its customers, many of them small, rural carriers, to figure out how to resolve the connectivity piece of this challenge.
“There is so much innovation happening because of this crisis, that I am very confident that we’ll accelerate the digital transformation,” Heuveldop said. “I have to believe that because of the corona crisis—but also the US dealing now head-on with deep social injustices—we will see the digital divide addressed and…social injustices dealt with” to level the playing field. “I believe that there is going to be long-lasting, positive change and transformation coming out of this crisis.”
That would be a good outcome for this crazy, intense year.
