Thursday 12 July 2018

Minimum Bandwidth Requirement for 5G Non-Standalone (NSA) Deployment

I was attending the IEEE 5G World Forum live-stream, courtesy of IEEE Tv and happen to hear Egil Gronstad, Senior Director of Technology Development and Strategy at T-Mobile USA. He said that they will be building a nationwide 5G network that will initially be based on 600 MHz band.


During the Q&A, Egil mentioned that because of the way the USA has different markets, on average they have 31 MHz of 600 MHz (Band 71). The minimum is 20 MHz and the maximum is 50 MHz.

So I started wondering how would they launch 4G & 5G in the same band for nationwide coverage? They have a good video on their 5G vision but that is of course probably going to come few years down the line.

In simple terms, they will first deploy what is known as Option 3 or EN-DC. If you want a quick refresher on different options, you may want to jump to my tutorial on this topic at 3G4G here.

The Master Node (recall dual connectivity for LTE, Release-12. See here) is an eNodeB. As with any LTE node, it can take bandwidths from 1.4 MHz to 20 MHz. So the minimum bandwidth for LTE node is 1.4 MHz.

The Secondary Node is a gNodeB. Looking at 3GPP TS 38.101-1, Table 5.3.5-1 Channel bandwidths for each NR band, I can see that for band 71


NR band / SCS / UE Channel bandwidth
NR Band
SCS
kHz
5 MHz
101,2 MHz
152 MHz
202 MHz
252 MHz
30 MHz
40 MHz
50 MHz
60 MHz
80 MHz
90 MHz
100 MHz
n71
15
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes








30

Yes
Yes
Yes








60













The minimum bandwidth is 5MHz. Of course this is paired spectrum for FDD band but the point I am making here is that you need just 6.4 MHz minimum to be able to support the Non-Standalone 5G option.

I am sure you can guess that the speeds will not really be 5G speeds with this amount of bandwidth but I am looking forward to all these kind of complaints in the initial phase of 5G network rollout.

I dont know what bandwidths T-Mobile will be using but we will see at least 10MHz of NR in case where the total spectrum is 20 MHz and 20 MHz of NR where the total spectrum is 50 MHz.

If you look at the earlier requirements list, the number being thrown about for bandwidth was 100 MHz for below 6 GHz and up to 1 GHz bandwidth for spectrum above 6 GHz. Don't think there was a hard and fast requirement though.

Happy to hear your thoughts.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

"If you look at the earlier requirements list, the number being thrown about for bandwidth was
100 MHz for below 6 GHz and up to 1 GHz bandwidth for spectrum above 6 GHz. Don't think there
was a hard and fast requirement though."

Practicalities.
Getting 100MHz of contiguous bandwidtb in the [0,3) / [3,6) GHz bands
is going to be very difficult as that is the most coveted spectrum
for a multitude of RATs.

In the true mmWave bands, this should be easier to do.

With 5G NR you could mitigate against this due to the fact
that the SSB can be miles away in the spectrum from the BWPs.
Which means :

1. Contiguous bandwidth is not necessarily a must

2. UE initial signal acquisition time/power costs are traded for
BWP flexibility.


And of course you are forced to use the higher OFDM SCS (60KHz + )
in the [6,53) GHz band.

Frank Rayal said...

I think it is much simpler than that: They will deploy some form of LTE and call it 5G :)
Joking aside, there will be practically little difference in 600 MHz between the LTE and 5G on the access side. The difference is higher in 2.5, 3.5 and up where massive MIMO and beamforming can be deployed.