Standards for the 5G era ITU membership gathered at the quadrennial World Telecommunication Standardization Assembly (WTSA-16) have accelerated support for standards work on 5G, IoT, smart cities, fintech – and more.

ITU membership has called for ITU’s standardization arm to expand its study of the wireline networking innovations required to achieve the ambitious performance targets of smart 5G systems. This call has come in parallel with ITU members’ reaffirmation of the importance of ITU’s standardization work to drive the coordinated development of ultra-high-speed transport networks, the Internet of Things, future video technologies, and smart cities and communities.

The Assembly also revised two of the A series ITU-T Recommendations that guide ITU-T’s work, and in addition approved five ITU standards on subjects including international mobile roaming and Internet Exchange Points.

“The new standardization strategies to be decided at this Assembly will provide the foundation for ICT development and the creation of a knowledge society,” said Youssef Chahed, head of Tunisia’s government. “Standards are important to success in innovation and creativity, for example in 5G communication and Smart Cities.”

ITU Secretary-General Houlin Zhao said: “The WTSA process continues to be the world’s foremost platform for multi-stakeholder collaboration in the interests of leveraging ICTs to drive sustainable development. ITU’s unique public-private partnership of members from government, industry and academia is essential to its value proposition. Our Member States ensure that ITU is globally represented, and this gives great strength to our standardization work. We work with our members to strengthen ITU and the task of this Assembly is to ensure that standardization remains well-positioned to support the development of the global ICT ecosystem.”

The decisions of the WTSA-16 will shape ITU-T into a form optimized to assist government, industry and academia in achieving their ambitions for year 2020 and beyond, in fields including IMT-2020 (5G), the Internet of Things, Smart Cities, and the ICT sector’s contribution to the pursuit of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals.

Key takeaways from a 3GPP presentation on 5G:

• widely varying use cases

• widely varying performance requirements

• is not really about connecting people, but more about connecting things

• No single technology will satisfy all of these requirements

–>These requirements will not all be met at the same point in time

3 High Level 5G Use Cases:

• Enhanced Mobile Broadband
• Massive Machine Type Communications
• Ultra Reliable and Low Latency Communications