New blog from Chair elect David Orloff on our up and coming 5G workshop

The Small Cell Forum has a vital role to play in the development of 5G, which will have small cells at its heart. If your organization will be impacted at all by future wireless networks, our 5G Workshop, held at the Forum’s European Plenary in Rome on September 15, will be an essential event.

I believe that fragmentation is one of the biggest risks to 5G achieving its aims in full. Proprietary and pre-standard efforts, and closed-doors partnerships, threaten the creation of a unified platform which is commercially accessible to all.

With the support of its members, the Forum can play a powerful part in avoiding that outcome. It has always been committed to open architectures and transparent, inclusive processes, and these are even more important as 5G approaches. This will be a key theme of the workshop, which Alan Law and I will chair in Rome.

Not only will it kick off the Forum’s new work program, which focuses on a smooth migration path to 5G, but it will seek the views and input of as many stakeholders as possible. This will ensure that the program is fully aligned to the key priorities for the industry – interoperability and consistency in HetNet and small cell platforms, both for current HetNet deployments and for the 5G future. 

The input into 5G requirements from the workshop will be fed directly into the detailed plans for the two Forum work items for 2016-17. These are Deploying Hyperdense Networks and Enabling Digitized Enterprise, and in both cases, it will be important to align their work with 5G requirements.

Key areas of discussion will be:

• Understanding service and customer requirements for 5G
• Understanding the relationship between 5G and small cells; and what special 5G small cells will involve
• Aligning and driving Small Cell Forum working group actions towards 5G

The importance of this issue is highlighted by the wide range of high level contributors from operators and vendors with a deep engagement in the small cell and the 5G processes (link to program). I urge you to join us in Rome and have your say on how 5G will look, and how it should shape the Forum’s agenda.