MWC Day 1 – 5G – Not a demo.

ZTE has the best handset demonstration of 5G.

• Doing a round of the 5G demonstrations revealed a disappointing situation which also did not hold up well to close inspection or questioning.
  • First, Samsung: which I rate as the most disappointing.
  • The 5G devices on the stand (that one can play with) have no reference in the software or settings to 5G making me wonder whether it is there at all.
  • Samsung’s 5G experts could not say why this was the case or what frequencies had been enabled in the device.
  • This device was also slimmer than all of the other devices where one could be certain that 5G had been implemented.
  • Samsung also showed two “live” demos.
  • The first was an interactive baseball demo that turned out to be a mock-up running on the device only.
  • The second was a live stream that was being broadcast from a 5G antenna under the table to a 5G device sitting in a cradle.
  • The Samsung 5G expert refused to remove the device from the cradle so it could be seen running on its own as this would “set off the alarm”
  • Both the cradle and the device had their own alarm tags leading me to wonder whether the video feed was being received by the cradle and fed via USBC to the device.
  • The Samsung 5G representative was unclear on this issue.
  • Second: Xiaomi which has recently launched the budget 5G MIX 3 5G (for $599).
  • This device had explicit radio settings related to 5G but the entire cellular connectivity system has been disabled so no demonstration was possible.
  • Third: Alcatel which had only plastic mock-ups available.
  • Fourth: Huawei: where the only 5G handset was safely locked away behind glass.
  • However, Huawei does have a modem the size of a domestic router which receives signal and distributes the signal to other devices via WiFi.
  • Huawei confirmed that the production mmWave version would have a terminal for an external antenna to be connected for mmWave reception.
  • This is working well at 3.5Ghz on Vodafone’s stand with line-of-sight to a basestation antenna 10 feet away.
  • Fifth, Nokia: which has both the Spiderman demo (see here) and a good table tennis demonstration both of which are VR based and rely on the latency intolerance of VR when it comes to reaction speed to the user’s movements.
  • These demos make a case for 5G but rely on VR to take off in a big way to justify a whole network roll-out.
  • Sixth, ZTE: had the best 5G handset demonstration.
  • ZTE has slightly fatter-than-usual devices that are streaming 5G signals directly to the terminal at both 28Ghz & 3.5Ghz.
  • The mmWave antenna at 28Ghz is 12” from the terminal but at least one knows that it works as placing a hand in between the two stops the video.
  • The other is at 3.5Ghz and is working well albeit over a short distance.
  • Seventh, LG: which had plenty of LGV50 ThinQ devices to play with including a dual screen version.
  • However, once again, all cellular connectivity had been disabled making me wonder how ready the 5G solution really is.
• Surprising as it may sound, ZTE has the best 5G handset demo which I see as being the closest demonstration of something that could approximate to reality.
• Nokia came in second as with its table tennis table which was being streamed directly to a WiFi puck that was physically connected to the headsets.
• Samsung came in last largely because my expectations for its prowess were higher given the noise it made at launch last week and its position as the global No, 1 handset maker.
• This broadly in line with Qualcomm’s expectation where commercial chips will ship in volume in H2 2019 for relevant device volumes in 2020.
• Things need to improve a lot in the next 12 months.