There are three nationwide LTE/5G networks in the US. As I could roam in all three of them when I was recently in the US, I also had a look at the bands that are requested by the third network to be reported by the UE. So here are the results:
Yes, the post titles are getting a bit long these days. Sorry about that. In this part, let’s have a look which 4G LTE and 5G NR bands for 5G Non-Standalone (NSA, ENDC) another nationwide US network requests my mobile devices to report and how this differs from the network I had a look at … Continue reading Roaming Report – Part 8 – Frequency Bands used for LTE and 5G in the US – Operator 2
As I live in Europe, I pretty much know the EU LTE and 5G frequency bands by heart. In North America, however, the frequency ranges and particularly the band numbers are significantly different, so I had a closer look which bands my devices were using while having been there, and which bands the networks asked … Continue reading Roaming Report – Part 7 – Frequency Bands used for LTE and 5G in the US – Operator 1
When I was last in the US back in 2019, I noticed that quite a number of the test smartphones (from the EU) I had with me would not do LTE Carrier Aggregation (CA). Even worse, my devices where often sent to a 5 or 10 MHz Carrier, so data transfer speeds were abysmally slow … Continue reading Roaming Report – Part 6 – 5G Roaming in the US fixes the lack of no LTE-CA on some Devices!
Recently, I’ve been on a two week skiing trip in Bad Gastein, a small village in the Austrian alps. As usual and also because my default cellular connectivity did not meet my needs, I had a closer look at the local connectivity options and gained some interesting insights. For testing purposes and of course for … Continue reading 5G n78 Shines in the Austrian Alps
One of the nice things of the 5G Core Network architecture is that it allows the concealment, i.e .the encryption of the user’s identifier. While in previous network generations, this ID is referred to as the IMSI (International Mobile Subscriber Identity), it has been renamed to SUPI (Subscription Permanent Identity) in 5G. Under normal circumstances, … Continue reading 5G – The SIM Card and the SUCI
And while I’m already writing about recent personal roaming firsts, I should also mention that I saw my first personal 5G use while roaming in Austria in May 2021.
At the moment, 5G networks in Europe are typically based on the Non-Standalone Architecture (NSA). This means that the LTE radio network and the LTE core network is used as the anchor for a connection, and 5G is added as a speed-booster when available. In the future, however, network operators will also roll out 5G … Continue reading How To Choose Between 5G SA and NSA
In the previous post on the topic I wrote about the three eras of telecom infrastructure hardware. As we are now entering the third area, there are not only whitepapers written about how everything from the radio network to the mobile core can be but into containers, but there are also demo videos of such … Continue reading An ‘Everything in Containers’ LTE and 5G Demo
Last year I wrote about a 5G Americas whitepaper that describes how 3GPP has standardized the 5G core in a way that lends itself for cloud based implementation. In short, that means that control plane functions are split into microservices, deployed on bare metal clusters in containers and managed with Kubernetes. So far the theory. … Continue reading The Cloud Based 5GC – From Theory To Practice