The fifth mobile genereation 5G is on everyone’s lips and the government has formulated its own 5G strategy. Is this hype justified in the sense of a groundbreaking technological innovation or is it the mere continuation of previous mobile standards? What is different at 5G compared to previous generations? Are there concrete applications already? Will 5G enable targeted e-health or telemedicine applications, the production or factory of the future, smart grids or smart cities, or automated driving?

Which infrastructural conditions are necessary to implement the 5G rollout? Many current and future applications require high bandwidths that can only be implemented with an appropriate infrastructure. While 5G will only be available in the metropolitan areas for the time being, the question arises as to whether the regions also benefit from a broad-based roll-out or how, from a technological point of view, the prerequisites for the digital transformation process can be created across the board?

The Salzburg Chamber of Commerce invited an Enquette to this question on 11 July 2019. Following a keynote speech by the Broadcasting and Telecommunications Regulatory Commission on the awarding of licenses, representatives of Salzburg AG, A1 Telekom Austria AG and Magenta Telekom presented different solutions based on 5G. Subsequently, experts, including Peter Dorfinger, research line manager Intelligent Communication Technologies of the Salzburg Research Forschungsgesellschaft, discussed key issues: opportunities for the economy, what is already happening today and what will be possible in the future.

Reliability 5G

5G is currently one of the central research topics of Salzburg Research. Here we are researching the reliability of 5G, as this is one of the key challenges for the networking of machines, vehicles and robots. Peter Dorfinger emphasized the need for independent control and monitoring of networks in critical processes. That is the only way to ensure that companies have confidence in the new technology. We focus on the fact htat this reliability can be independently verified and develop measuring and monitoring methods. This is to ensure that users of 5G can independently control the promises of manufacturers or operators.

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