Videotron announces testing as 5G gains momentum in Canada

MONTREAL — Quebecor Inc.’s Videotron said Tuesday it will begin to test 5G technologies as part of a new project, in a move that appears to be part of an increasing push toward the next generation of wireless in recent months. All carriers will eventually get to 5G, Videotron CEO Manon Brouillette said in an interview following a lunchtime speech at the Board of Trade of Metropolitan Montreal. “It’s like LTE. If you wanted to be a real player, you had to go there. It’s like any other evolution of technology,” she said. “You have two choices. Either you go on and you stay in the game, or you don’t go and you leave the game.” In late 2015, Telus Corp. and Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd. announced they would create a lab to help develop 5G technology, while in July 2016 BCE Inc. and Nokia Corp. said they had wrapped up the first Canadian 5G trial. Also in July, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission opened up 10.85 GHz of spectrum for 5G. “I think it’s beginning to take shape,” Johanne Lemay, co-president of telecommunications consulting company Lemay-Yates Associates Inc., said in a phone interview when asked about recent momentum in the 5G space. “I think we should expect to see more action from Canadian carriers in the near future on 5G,” she added. Videotron held a press conference on Tuesday morning to announce the creation of an “open-air smart living lab” together with Ericsson AB, Montreal’s École de technologie supérieure and the non-profit Quartier de l’innovation. One of the projects will be the creation of a “smart” student residence, which will begin in early 2017. The lab is a move Brouillette said will help the company figure out what its business case for 5G — which will have much faster speeds than LTE, low latency, and higher density of coverage — will be. “You need to put in place your business model before rolling out 5G, because it’s going to be totally different than any other layer of network that we deployed before,” Brouillette said. “So this is why we want to start now, to identify applications, segment areas where there could be a place for us, to make sure that when we customize our 5G networks and infrastructure, everything is put in place to realize our vision.” The company needs to conduct testing to determine how to deliver the density of coverage and low latency 5G requires, Brouillette said, as well as where the opportunities lie. “We could decide that we will go in health, that it will be in industrial… various segments are available to us, but if there’s no traction for one of those segments, we need to identify that now, not to put any effort in it,” she said. “And we need to identify which segment will have the most traction in the market, and then the infrastructure needs to be customized toward that segment in particular.” While 5G is estimated to still be five years away, Brouillette said “five years is very fast in technology, so this is why we want to start now, to invest, to test, to try.” Lemay noted that 5G could be here even earlier than estimated, as companies like Verizon Communications Inc. in the U.S. try to accelerate the timeline. “There seems to be some interest in deploying 5G faster, maybe, than five to seven years,” she said, though she noted that there isn’t yet a defined standard for the technology. Desjardins Capital Markets analyst Maher Yaghi said that because those final 5G standards haven’t been published, many operators who are testing 5G are working with pre-standard specifications, meaning the tests are “in reality 4G derivatives or 4G+.” In a research note Tuesday following a 5G event hosted by Desjardins, he also said carriers that currently offer 4G have a “significant advantage” when it comes to the launch of 5G, and that there is “only a very small opening for potential new entrants.” However, he sees the potential for new industry players involved in building the more-dense networks 5G requires, noting that “it is likely that new independent players would sprout up to build these networks, thus increasing the outsourcing of network management.” Even though 5G is expected to use spectrum in bands higher than 6GHz, which are currently not used by wireless operators, “owning spectrum in the 700MHz, 2GHz and 4GHz range will give operators a commanding lead in launching 5G services,” Yaghi said. “This is because offloading specific signals on ‘old’ spectrum will be important in terms of reducing the need to build coverage using micro cells and indoor hotspots in urban settings.” He added that while in the past, the move from 3G to 4G increased revenues due to more usage of mobile devices, “5G has the potential to add numerous sources of potential usage (pervasive video, virtual reality, smart office, broadband to the home, IoT, connected vehicles, etc), thus helping to extend recent growth in the industry without necessarily disadvantaging wireline revenue streams.” One of the challenges in getting to 5G, no matter the timeline, is that it will require a lot of spectrum, Lemay said, adding there will be “an increasing role for unlicensed spectrum” in 5G deployment. In addition to investing in spectrum, companies will have to invest in beefing up their networks in order to achieve density of coverage and low latency, which requires “lots of small antennas,” she noted. Overall, Lemay said, the technology holds the potential for “a little bit of disruption with respect to how networks have evolved for the past 15 years.” “Some carriers might emerge as winners in this game, and others less. You may even see, maybe, some new players in some instances,” she added. — With reporting by Anja Karadeglija at akarad@thewirereport.ca and editing by Charelle Evelyn at cevelyn@thewirereport.ca

Videotron announces testing as 5G gains momentum in Canada

News | September 20, 2016

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Videotron announces testing as 5G gains momentum in Canada

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