Is 5G a hardware or software?

The companies best positioned to take advantage of the 5G growth include Ericsson, Nokia, and Qualcomm .

Multichannel, highly integrated RF transceivers are the core piece of the 5G hardware puzzle. An RF signal bandwidth up to 1 GHz is required, with the possibility to operate in multiband. Implementing an RF sampling technique enables the described characteristics in a simpler architecture and with reduced cost.

While older 4G LTE networks have been built mostly on hardware, 5G wireless is based largely on software-defined network (SDN) functions replacing that hardware .