At both the 2018 Winter Olympics in South Korea and the 2020 Summer Olympics in Japan, mobile operators are planning to use 5G to provide innovative new services to spectators, viewers and the organisers. The next generation of mobile technologies could transform the experience of watching live events, while the determination in East Asia to showcase 5G at the 2018 and 2020 Olympics is accelerating the global development of the technology.
A new whitepaper from InterDigital and Mobile World Live considers what mobile technologies could be showcased at the Olympics in South Korea and Japan, what kind of challenges operators and device vendors are facing in hitting their ambitious deadlines and the visionary new services 5G technologies could enable at the games.
As 3GPP isn’t planning to produce the first incarnation of Release 15 (the first 5G specification) until June 2018, any 5G technology on show in the Winter Olympics in PyeongChang, scheduled to take place from 9 to 25 February 2018, will need to be pre-standard.
Once it becomes commercially available, 5G, supported by advanced 4G and cellular broadcast technologies, could transform the experience of watching live sports. For example, a very fast, low latency mobile connection could enable a spectator to watch an event from different vantage points, switching at will between a camera mounted on a player’s helmet to a birds-eye view to a conventional side-on viewpoint. 5G may even allow operators to transmit enough data to enable consumers to watch 3D holograms or 360-degree renditions of the sports action. Equipped with a virtual reality headset, a viewer could simply move their head around to watch different aspects of the event.
Assuming 5G delivers a dramatic increase in cell capacity, it could also enable spectators to choose which athlete they want to follow in events that are spread over a wide area, such as road cycling and sailing. Moreover, augmented reality applications could enable spectators in the venue to point their smartphone at an athlete and see a short bio and statistics superimposed on the display. Depending on the terms of the broadcasting rights, spectators may also be able to use their smartphones to live stream short clips of an event to their friends in another location.
New mobile technologies also promise to make it easier for the Games venues to accommodate large numbers of people and ensure they are comfortable. At the same time, mobile service providers could use connected sensors throughout the host cities to give visitors to the games personalised real-time information about the best transport options to reach a specific venue in time for a specific event.
As well as showcasing new 5G technologies, the upcoming Olympics are also likely to be supported by commercial 4G services providing downlink speeds of about 1Gb/s, enabled by the ongoing advances in LTE technology. Both the 4G and 5G networks used at the Olympics could be enhanced and supported by other new technologies, such as Network Function Virtualisation (NFV) and Software Defined Networking (SDN), which help mobile operators to allocate network resources more efficiently and effectively.