Telecom standards and buildout
An international telecom standards body is already working on defining the next 5G mobile network. The effort has been dubbed IMT-2020, for International Mobile Telecommunications, with a completion goal of 2020.
There’s broad agreement that 5G will require tremendous network density, access to high-band spectrum, massive MIMO, millimeter wave and more technological features, but that has to be locked down in a standard.
Sounds like quite a network. I can't wait.
But when it comes it will seem inevitable just like today's internet seems inevitable or how the landline phone system seemed already a part of the existing world in the 1980's. So it's always instructive to go back in time to see what issues had to be dealt with to complete those massive efforts.
This article from the 1905 issue of The Atlantic describes some of the thinking behind the implementation of the national phone system.
[S]o rapid since 1900 has been the expansion of the network of local, toll, and long-distance lines over the entire surface of the United States that a revision of all former calculations has become necessary. In the eyes of men who are to raise and spend millions upon further increase of telephone facilities, a forecast of conditions in which every fifth individual will be a telephone-user no longer seems chimerical; the millions needed for such a purpose are actually being raised and invested by cool-headed business men, in the belief that an era of universal telephony is near at hand.
The telephone system was the first Internet, and it was analog. An amazing effort that really changed the world.
2087
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