Opening the 5G wireless frontier

An explosion of devices and new forms of digital content is producing a continued surge in wireless internet traffic. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC), accordingly, is working on ways to free up more airwaves for new wireless networks and services. On Thursday, July 14, the FCC will release its Spectrum Frontiers order that will recommend ways to unleash new batches of higher frequency spectrum for fifth-generation, or 5G, wireless networks.  

Mobile video and the internet of things, which will add tens of billions of new devices to the network, are stretching the ability of our wireless networks to handle them. Cisco estimates that by 2020, smartphones will generate more traffic than PCs and that non-PC devices (including smartphones, tablets and machine-to-machine links) will generate 71% of all traffic. A new generation of wireless networks will be needed both to handle these existing trends and to propel completely new services.  

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