* EU signed 5G agreement with South Korea last year
* EU in talks with Japan, soon China
* Region tries to claw back competitiveness with U.S., Asia
* Companies like Nokia, Ericsson, Huawei working ontechnology
* Mobile industry hopes to have 5G networks in place by 2020
By Julia Fioretti and Leila Abboud
BRUSSELS/BARCELONA, March 3 (Reuters) - The European Unionis looking to sign agreements with China and Japan and theUnited States to cooperate on developing the next generation ofmobile broadband as it seeks to help its companies catch up inthe race to develop such technologies.
Europe, once a leader in the 1990s in the second-generationGSM technology standard for mobile phone networks moving intothe digital era, has fallen behind the United States, Japan andSouth Korea in the deployment of the latest 4G standard formobile broadband services.
The region's network operators including Britain's Vodafone and Spain's Telefonica were slower to move to4G than Japan, Korea and the United States and adoption inEurope remains lower compared to other advanced economies.
European policymakers are now trying not to repeat themistakes of the past and are seeking to be at the forefront ofdeveloping the standards for 5G, which promises much fastervideo downloads, denser network coverage and the possibility of connecting billions of everyday electronic objects to create"the internet of things".
"With 5G, Europe has a great opportunity to reinvent itstelecom industrial landscape," Guenther Oettinger, the EU'sCommissioner for the Digital Economy and Society, told theMobile World Congress in Barcelona on Tuesday.
In June last year the European Commission signed anagreement with South Korea in which the two sides committed tocooperating on setting technical standards and ensure thenecessary radio frequencies are able to support the new network.
"It is our intention to sign similar agreements with otherkey regions of the world, notably Japan, China, and the UnitedStates," Oettinger said.
The Commission will soon start formal discussions on 5G withChina, according to a person familiar with the matter, which isalso keen to have its say on what 5G should do. China is home tothe world's second-biggest maker of mobile network equipment, Huawei, and ZTE, the fifth biggest.
But the chief executive of France's Orange saidwork remained to be done on 4G, whose rollout across Europe hasbeen patchy and slow.
"We need to prepare for 5G but let's not jump too fast. Weshould enjoy 4G," he said.
Most industry experts expect the first commercialdeployments of 5G in the run-up to the Tokyo Olympics in 2020.
Much work remains to be done to set technical standards forthe technology, and figure out exactly what it is supposed to dothat current 4G gear cannot, experts say.
In the meantime, companies that make mobile networkequipment such as Sweden's Ericsson, Huawei,Finland's Nokia and France-based Alcatel-Lucent are jockeying for position and carrying outexperiments with operators to prepare for 5G.
Japan's NTT DoCoMo is already working with Nokia and Ericsson to develop networks running at highfrequencies for use in the 5G wireless era - technology expectedto be showcased at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics.
Meanwhile Huawei has said it will invest $600 million in 5Gresearch and expects to have a network ready for deployment by2020.
"We are closely working with our customers to get to 5G. Itis the only way to fully meet the demand of machine to machinetechnology," said Huawei's chief executive Ken Hu.
The head of Nokia, Rajeev Suri, said that he thinks thedrive to develop 5G technology promises to be a "three-horserace" between Ericsson, Huawei and his firm, leaving out thefourth biggest equipment maker, Alcatel-Lucent.
"I don't aspire only to be third," said Suri on a panel onTuesday. "We will move up." (Editing by Greg Mahlich)
Vodafone (VOD)
