Today’s mobile networks are essentially designed to provide coverage and capacity for all connected users, devices and services. They compete for the same resources, but this generally works, for much of the time. In essence, they have been optimised for a single service – mobile broadband. However, as services have proliferated, it’s become clear that the network needs to evolve to enable different services, with different needs to be delivered, consistently. In addition to other advances, this capability to support multiple differentiated services is what the next generation of mobile network technology, 5G, will unlock.

When we watch a video, we expect it to play smoothly, without interruption or gaps. That’s generally true when we watch broadcast television, use cable or satellite, or play it from a storage device, such as a DVD or Blu-ray disk. But, people have increasingly started to watch video through mobiles and this has created a host of challenges. Without going into technical details, the unique demands of mobile networks mean that viewers will often experience delays, suffer from buffering while playback is halted and tries to catch up, and so on.