IEEE seeks to coalesce industry, policymakers, academia around 5G

The Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) is calling on global industry leaders, policymakers and academia to coalesce in a neutral forum to move 5G forward. The purpose of the IEEE 5G Initiative is to engage professionals worldwide to work to solve the challenges associated with 5G and lay the foundation to realize its many opportunities, according to the organization. Volunteers from both industry and academia are being sought as several working groups are being established.

“5G is not only evolutionary, providing higher bandwidth and lower latency than current-generation technology; more importantly, 5G is revolutionary, in that it is expected to enable fundamentally new applications with much more stringent requirements in latency and bandwidth," said Ashutosh Dutta, co-chair of the 5G initiative and lead member of the technical staff at AT&T. “5G should help solve the last-mile/last-kilometer problem and provide broadband access to the next billion users on earth at much lower cost because of its use of new spectrum and its improvements in spectral efficiency.”