Asian countries such as South Korea and Japan will be the leaders in commercialising 5G, edging out their US and European counterparts, according to a new analysis.

A part of Frost & Sullivan’s Automotive & Transportation Growth Partnership Service programme, the new analysis ’The Global Advent of 5G in Cars’ by Frost & Sullivan, pointed out that with the penetration of long-term evolution (LTE) connections being fairly strong across Asian countries - nearly 63 per cent in South Korea and 44 per cent in Japan - the available infrastructure can easily support 5G.

The world will soon see 5G emerge as a blend of pre-existing technologies such as 2G, 3G, 4G and WiFi to allow higher network coverage, availability and density, it said.

With its key differentiator being greater connectivity, 5G will act as an enabler for autonomous vehicles, machine-to-machine and machine-to- infrastructure services, and the Internet of Things (IoT).

It will also penetrate the over-the-air (OTA) updates space as level three or four automation requires a massive amount of data processing to occur in real time.

Through 5G, the OTA updates space will be able to improve the customer experience and save on recall spending.

Major service providers expect to deploy a pilot project in Tokyo Olympics and Fifa World Cup Russia by 2018, said the report.

Meanwhile, Asian service providers such as NTT, DoCoMo, Huawei and SKT have entered various partnerships to set up trials for 5G in various bandwidths and identify its potential, it said.

Ramnath Eswaravadivoo, automotive and transportation senior research analyst, Frost & Sullivan, said: “However, the biggest challenge for network service providers is to enable 5G to provide end-to-end coverage and achieve latency less than one millisecond.

“As such, network service providers have their work cut out to live up to 5G’s promise – the seamless extension of services and coverage anywhere, anytime, regardless of whether the user is in a dense area like a stadium/city centre or in a village/high-speed train.”

While highly automated cars are expected to commercialise only by 2020, 5G will be the driving force behind vehicle applications involving machine learning, brake/steering, ECU integration, highly accurate GPS, and sensor fusion, said the report.

It will also facilitate wearable devices like smart glasses and smart watches, and help make augmented reality and virtual reality mainstream features in cars, it added. - TradeArabia News Service