Friday 22 December 2017

The small detail about 5G you may have missed...


While going through the latest issue of CW Journal, I came across this article from Moray Rumney, Lead Technologist, Keysight. It highlights an interesting point that I missed out earlier that 5G also includes all LTE specifications from Release 15 onwards.

I reached out to our CW resident 3GPP standards expert Sylvia Lu to clarify and received more details.
There is a whole lot of detail available in RP-172789.zip. Here RIT stands for Radio Interface Technology and SRIT for Set of RIT.

In fact at Sylvia clarified, NB-IoT and Cat-M will also be part of the initial IMT-2020 submissions early next year. Thanks Sylvia.


There is also this nice presentation by Huawei in ITU (here) that describes Requirements, Evaluation Criteria and Submission Templates for the development of IMT-2020. It is very helpful in understanding the process.

Coming back to the question I have often asked (see here for example),
1. What features are needed for operator to say they have deployed 5G, and
2. How many sites / coverage area needed to claim 5G rollout

With LTE Release-15 being part of 5G, I think it has just become easy for operators to claim they have 5G.

What do you think?

1 comment:

Zahid Ghadialy said...

We probably have our first announcement on this topic. T-Mobile USA is rolling out coverage in 600MHz, mainly in the rural areas. It also wants to use 600MHz to do 5G in 2020. It could be a simple case of upgrading the network to Release-15. See this news: T-Mobile highlights 600MHz deployment progress.

It should also be pointed out that one of the requirements of IMT-2020 is to have bandwidths of 100MHz below 6GHz spectrum and 1GHz above the 6GHz spectrum. T-Mo has up to 50MHz only in most areas and less than 50MHz in some other areas.