In keeping with the ultra-innovative nature of the telco industry, an event celebrating the latest generation of mobile technology has been dominated by the need to look forward to the next one. At LTE World Summit 2014, which opened at the Amsterdam RAI today, 5G was the elephant in the auditorium.

The morning’s keynotes culminated in a discussion panel (pictured) entitled ‘Paving the way towards 5G’. The panellists constituted a who’s who of European and Middle Eastern operator CTOs and focused on the anticipating the challenges and opportunities involved in developing the next mobile standard. Erik Hoving, CTO of KPN Group, was especially outspoken in his assessment of past mistakes that should not be repeated.

The afternoon’s sessions included one on ‘LTE Evolution’, but Dr Tao Linan, CTO of ZTE Wireless, was soon outlining some of the key components of the future 5G standard, presumably cognizant of ZTE’s 5G access network architecture announcement earlier today. He was followed by Qualcomm’s Peter Carson, who focused more on LTE Cat 6, having co-launched, with Samsung, the first commercially available Cat 6 smartphone last week.

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Having already spoken to Citrix about the importance of NFV in future standards, Telecoms.com also spoke to Joel Brand, VP of Product Management at Kumu Networks, whose company has developed a technology that cancels self-interference, which enables simultaneous transmission and reception of radio signals, without the compromises involved with both FDD and TDD (as mentioned in our in-depth feature on 5G). This could be the kind of technological inflection point that helps define the standard.

Of course there are many other keynotes, discussion and stands exploring every facet of the technology required to power and optimise LTE today, it’s clear that all stakeholders in the mobile industry already have half an eye on 5G, and watching it evolve will be fascinating.