First, can you tell us about over-the-air (OTA) testing and why it will be needed for 5G?
Garreau: 5G lays the foundation for a connected society in the near future—a world where everything that benefits from being connected will be connected. The internet will move out from computer screens and smartphones and into the physical world, where objects will communicate directly with each other. Examples range from automated factories with production and logistics efficiencies reaching new heights to self-driving cars and services, farming, medical services, consumer electronics, smart homes, smart cities, etc. In short, this is the next digitalization phase of the world. Completely new businesses will be built on this opportunity. It is a movement that will impact all industries, across all markets around the world.
There are three major cornerstones of 5G: increased bandwidth and capacity for mobile data able to handle the ever-increasing amounts of wireless data traffic; ultra-reliability and low latency for mission critical services for real-time critical connections such as in self-driving cars, robotics, automated factories, and medical applications; and reduced overhead for massive-scale Internet of Things (IoT) applications—for example, sensor networks consuming very little bandwidth and power. All this backed up by the cloud through the 5G networks, enabling a multitude of services to be efficiently rolled out. There is quite a broad spectrum of ways 5G standards can be adapted to handle all the application cases of the connected world.