Niklas Heuveldop, president and CEO of Ericsson North America, predicted 5G could boost US GDP by $500 billion, highlighting mining and manufacturing sectors as likely to reap significant benefits.
Heuveldop used a keynote to explain the technology could create 3 million jobs in the country, tipping his hat to US operators which he said are expected to pump $275 billion into deployments.
Giving the mining sector as an example, he noted use cases studied by the vendor could deliver net benefits of approximately $57 billion per year to the industry and $4 billion for service providers.
And smart manufacturing uses could cut up to $6 million from annual operating costs of a factory.
“We see $50 billion opportunity for our service provider customers to provide the connectivity solutions in the smart manufacturing space”, Heuveldop stated.
Across the consumer field, he flagged gaming and sports as having the highest potential, with the former presenting a $150 billion opportunity for operators.
Heuveldop also highlighted the potential for 5G networks and AI to cut global carbon emissions, with a reduction of more than 15 per cent possible. As a result, he was hopeful the ICT industry could have a “phenomenal” potential in “contributing to the exponential roadmap for climate action”.
In the energy sector, by leveraging AI, sensors and asset condition monitoring “you can secure the efficient production of energy” in a highly distributed fashion, including by technologies for tracking performance of energy production sites, he explained.
And the mining sector could employ smart technology to control air-conditioning, which Heuveldop said accounted for around 50 per cent of current total energy consumption.
Meanwhile, Ericsson has outlined details of a new Cloud RAN portfolio, due to be released in 2021, aimed at offering operators more flexibility with their infrastructure builds and serve as a catalyst for more openness.
The company stated Cloud RAN will be released in stages to match operators’ 5G rollout schedules, beginning in Q4 2021. It is designed to handle the compute functionality in the RAN, complementing purpose-built baseband offerings in the radio system portfolio.
It is further intended to deliver network capabilities for large-scale and centralised 5G deployments, addressing new use cases for indoor, enterprise, stadium and beyond.
Ericsson explained operators would also be able to “incrementally” add Cloud RAN capabilities to their existing 5G networks, because it is fully compatible with the vendor’s radio system portfolio, and is compatible with spectrum sharing, non-standalone and standalone 5G.
The first stage covers low band 5G “to enable an easy transition to virtualised RAN” using commercial hardware platforms. It will also offer mid-band compatibility in future said Ericsson.
