Rogers officially activates Canada’s first 5G network
Customers must wait since devices are not yet authorized to connect to it
TORONTO Rogers Communications Inc. marked a milestone on Wednesday as the telecom provider officially turned on its wireless 5G network in downtown areas of Toronto, Ottawa, Vancouver and Montreal.
But while Rogers says the next-generation network is now up and running, customers will not be able to access it for some time because devices have not yet been authorized to connect to it.
Officially lighting up the network, however, is a signal to device manufacturers that Rogers is open for business, and ready to work with companies such as Apple and Samsung to ensure 5G devices are compatible with network infrastructure.
In a news release Wednesday morning, Rogers chief executive Joe Natale said that the move toward 5G is as significant as when Rogers first went into wireless cellular networks. “5G will not only power businesses, it will fuel entire industries and drive Canada’s digital future” he said in the release.
In an interview with the Financial
Post, chief technology officer Jorge Fernandes cautioned that those effects would not be immediate. “Initially people won’t really see the difference from a consumer point of view,” Fernandes said. “Keep in mind the first release of 5G will use a non-stand-alone core. Basically what this means is that 5G will still use the 4G core. But over the next 12 to 18 months, a 5G stand-alone core will become available, so this is where some of the new capabilities of 5G will be brought to bear.”
Telecom providers are excited about 5G because it’s much faster than current networks. In addition to providing much more bandwidth, allowing faster data transfer, 5G promises to eventually allow for much lower latency, reducing the delay from when you press a button on your phone to the time when the cell network sends a response. Fernandes said that eventually the hope is that 5G will enable new services with all manner of internet-connected devices.
Rogers has managed to get a jump on competitors Bell and Telus with the 5G rollout by partnering with Swedish equipment
manufacturer Ericsson for its kit.
Bell and Telus want to use gear from Chinese manufacturer Huawei, which is considerably cheaper, but national security experts have raised concerns that the Huawei equipment might create the potential for foreign interference in critical communications systems.
In an emailed statement, Bell director of communications Marc Choma said Bell is also getting ready to launch its own early 5G network later this year once devices become available, but he hinted that the Huawei decision could delay broader rollout. “Canada has the opportunity to lead the world in 5G if our regulatory environment continues to encourage wireless infrastructure investment,” Choma said.
A handful of phones are already on the market in other parts of the world that offer 5G connectivity, but Rogers says that even if somebody brought one of those phones to Canada, they won’t be able to use the Rogers 5G network yet.
Their SIM cards won’t be updated until device-makers are ready to sell their devices here, and the companies can engage in a full-scale marketing push for the next-generation network.
Data plans and a more comprehensive rollout will wait until business partnerships are cemented, and companies start selling their phones in Canada later this year.
Rogers has said by the end of 2020 it intends to offer 5G in 20 Canadian markets, but the full rollout will take years.
Scott Young, infrastructure analyst with Toronto-based research firm Info-tech Research Group, noted that the high-frequency radio spectrum that allows for low-latency 5G won’t be made available by the federal government until 2021. “This puts Canada on track for deploying 5G within the low and mid bands first, and not being able to realize the benefits of the higher achievable speeds of the millimetre wave until later,” Young said in an email.
More broadly, Young said some of the hype around 5G is wearing off. While fully deployed networks may eventually allow for advanced technologies such as autonomous vehicles connected to wireless networks, for now, it mostly just means faster cellphone data.