In a previous post on this topic I was asking if anyone knew what the ‘g’ in gNB stood for. I got quite a number of suggestions but nobody knew for certain. So I dug a bit deeper and found the person who actually suggested the term.
When flipping trough the RAN3#92 report I came across the following:
“-> Offline_46 (ZTE):
– Find a proper name for “NB BS”
– various proposals, no agreement at first.
Vince Spatafora (AT&T): fNB?
Sivavakeesar Sivapathalingham (NEC): 5NB?
Sangeetha Banglae [sic] (Intel): gNB?
-> gNB was agreed to be the new name of “NB BS”.”
This is about as official as it can get but unfortunately even the report doesn’t say what the ‘g’ actually stands for. So I got in contact with Sangeetha Bangolae, and she replied the following:
“It was meant to be ‘next Generation’ Node B”
Further she told me that
“ngNB could have been possible, but again, only one letter was allowed, so since nNB would be confusing, I picked gNB…it ‘sound’ed also quite alright in my opinion.”
So there we go, the ‘g’ does NOT stand for “gigabit”-NB as I had speculated as well but for ‘next generation NB’!
Well done with your investigation! 🙂