2018 Keysight World Taipei | 直播訪談 Kailash Narayanan, VP of WDO, Keysight

Hello, very nice to meet you all. Happy to be here at Keysight World 2018 in Taipei. It's an exciting day and I'm really pleased to see the audience and the crowd get engaged with the different solutions we have and the different forums that we have to exchange good technical information. So thank you.

Yeah, thank you for the question. As you mentioned, 5G Release 15 has been in progress since early 2017. Now we have the first version of 5G NSA that was released in December 2017, and Release version 2 of the same release will come out in June focusing on the standalone mode. When I contrast what this brings relative to 4G and other technologies, I think it's going to be a great opportunity to showcase some of the vision of 5G around enhanced mobile broadband, some of the ultra-low latency applications involving mobile augmented reality, and clearly a lot of IoT related applications as well. I think operators are going to get a chance to increase ARPU, the average revenue per user. There are more applications that operators can take advantage of. Even in the PyeongChang Olympics that was held in February 2018, we saw some of these technologies being showcased that allows different types of services, different types of applications to be delivered, and different users can pay differently to take advantage of those services. So I'd say number one, it's multiple new categories of applications and services. In the past, it was just cellular data and voice. Now I think you have opportunities for different types of applications and services. The second thing I would say is quality of service will be improved. This is an advantage for the users as well as service providers because that can also be monetized. In the past, when you look at legacy technologies, you have situations where things just won't work when you move across cell boundaries or when you are in a large crowd, connectivity to the network is pretty challenging. Now I think quality of service can be improved significantly with 5G. And finally, I would also say this is an opportunity to redesign some of the networks to be more efficient. Current networks use about two percent of the world's generated power, and with taking a different look at the network architecture of the next generation network, there's gains to be made more from a cost and efficiency perspective. So all of this presents some challenges that we need to overcome before we can make all of this real. This is the vision, and Keysight is helping different partners across the ecosystem—chipset makers, UE makers, contract manufacturers, service providers, network equipment makers—to bring 5G reality and help achieve this vision.

Yeah, when you look at 5G, it certainly brings in quite a bit of technical complexity that other technologies did not bring. I mean, obviously whenever there is a new air interface, there's always technological challenges, but with 5G it's a little bit more. So I would categorize the challenges maybe in two different buckets: the technical challenges and then the deployment challenges. If you look at technical challenges, you have mostly associated with millimeter wave, which is now presenting a lot of opportunity to increase data rates and get wider bandwidths, but your antenna design has to be significantly different from how we've done in legacy technologies, and path loss at millimeter wave frequencies is much more significant. So you need to have antennas that can do narrow beamforming, etc., to increase that path loss. It also means that testing now has to move to over-the-air. These antennas are tightly integrated into the devices, and you need to make sure that the devices are tested and designed as a whole unit. You cannot think of antenna design as a separate thing. The other challenge is just the channel model for millimeter wave frequencies. The channel model is underway, and new channel models are being built for millimeter wave frequency bands. Keysight has many solutions to help move that forward. We're working with many universities and research labs and commercial companies on that. Millimeter wave mobility is another challenge that we're offering solutions for—handover solutions and throughput testing across cell boundaries. These are things that we're working on. So those are some of the technical challenges, but we have solutions to partner with the industry to overcome those challenges. On the deployment side, it's mostly ensuring a connected workflow. Something like 5G requires many companies to come together. Also within a company, there are many departments that need to come together to make sure that the entire workflow is addressed in a cost-effective manner to address time-to-market needs and also address it with good quality. And this is why we're focused on our PathWave platform and end-to-end workflow solutions around network emulation, which helps with the UE design and development. These are end-to-end workflow solutions that help bridge many departments inside a company to overcome siloed approaches, and we try to provide a very seamless workflow-based solution to overcome those challenges. So overcoming the technical challenges and deployment challenges by providing a connected workflow is how we can help the industry move this forward. And you know, geographically, there are many ecosystems that are forming. Some of them, what we need to watch for, shouldn't get too fragmented. It's good that the NR and NSA is getting standardized, and it's good that the different frequency bands are forming. And as long as we can have a scalable approach to cover all of the frequency bands and the different protocols, we should be able to overcome—the industry should be able to overcome these challenges. Thank you.