LTE will continue to be worked on until towards 2030, in spite of the industry’s evolution into 5G, a senior Deutsche Telekom exexcutive has claimed.
Speaking at 5G World Summit, Antje Williams, 5G Executive Program Manager, said there is still plenty of enhancements that can be made with existing LTE technology.
She said 5G networks, which will be rolled out across Deutsche Telekom’s footprint from 2020, will be built upon existing LTE. She said: “LTE will be the base for 5G. We do not define 5G by a new radio interface.”
However, she said that 5G offered a vast array of use cases, especially for the enterprise sector. She said this raises whether operators can play a different role than just connectivity.
Elsewhere, she spoke of the need for new kinds of regulation in order to reflect the increasingly converged fixed and mobile networks, as well as what the operator will do with legacy technology.
You can watch the video in full below. In the coming days, Mobile Europe will publish video interviews with executives from EE, Ericsson and Qualcomm.