The 3^rd annual Towards 5G was held successfully at Savoy Place, London at the end of January. It was attended by over 100 delegates from a wide ranging set of disciplines.



We were lucky to have not 1, but 2 chairs for the day. Kafil Ahmed, chair of the network, presided over the second half of the day and Mike Short oversaw the first half. As Mike opened the seminar, he described how each generation of connectivity had been described by 1 word: 3G = multimedia; 4G = broadband. He challenged each speaker to give their 1 word to describe 5G – the words are shown in the picture to the left and you can find out who said each word at the end of the blog!










Our first speaker was Professor Misha Dohler, who put on his special haptic glove, to tell us about the Internet of skills. The glove is able to feel real world things e.g. rainfall and the applications it could bring were wide ranging.

Later in the morning Professor Andy Sutton gave an interesting talk on the architecture and design of 5G. He stated that 2017 would be the defining year for 5G - let's see if his prediction comes true!


Ofcom’s Joe Butler’s talk got controversial when the dreaded word (whisper it… Brexit) was brought up relating to how we would work with Europe in the future. Luckily there were no arguments (!) but Joe did express that there was great appetite for the European community to work together on this issue.


The day was rounded off with a presentation and lively Q&A from Dr Deeph Chana about the security aspects of the 5G network, highlighting that it needed to be thought about from the very beginning.

 


 
1 word to describe 5G?
Professor Mischa Dohler - skills
Dr Nishanth Sastry - efficiency/flexibility
Professor Klaus Moessner - capacity
Professor Andy Sutton - enabler
Joe Butler - ubiquity
Professor Maziar Nekovee – transformative/magic
Professor Mark Beach – networked society
Mark Barrett - gigabit
Dr Reiner Hoppe - radio
Dr Deeph Chana - accessibility


 

Special thanks go to CST World and Altair for exhibiting at the event.


We hope that everyone enjoyed the event – as Kafil said at the end, we hope to see you next year for the 4^th annual event! (and the 5^th and the 6^th J )

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Weren’t there? You can catch up with the event on Twitter, in the photos section (coming next week) and on IET.tv (where the videos of the talks will be available in the coming weeks) and posted here on Engineering Communities


Also, why not have a look at some of the social media posts for the day.