In recent months, satellite services for smartphones have been hyped a lot. While surprising for many, including me, this didn’t come out of nowhere, and a lot of companies have worked on this topic for quite some time. 3GPP has also picked up the topic a few years ago with study items in 3GPP Release … Continue reading NTN Part 1 – 3GPP Rel. 17 – Non-Terrestrial Networks
Since 2018, I’ve been working in the area of putting 5G into practice. Back then, early versions of the 3GPP Release 15 specification had become available and equipment vendors started shipping first hardware and software. The standards were not developed overnight, however, but were preceded by visions, ideas, studies, and trials by at least half … Continue reading My 6G-Kickoff
Most cellular network operators around the world still have a circuit switched core network today for voice and SMS services for their 2G/3G access networks. There are a few exceptions like one operator in India that launched with an LTE-only VoLTE network a few years ago. But apart from a few, that is the status … Continue reading Verizon: The End Of Circuit Switching – The End Of An Era
Happy New Year 2020 to all of you! It’s the time of the year again when it makes sense to take a look back at the last 12 months of 2019 to see which tech things and events ‘have moved me’ during the course of the year. Like in the previous years, it is once … Continue reading Things That Moved Me in 2019
Back in the ‘good old days’, things were simple on the LTE air interface. It served one purpose and one purpose only: Fast Internet connectivity. This allowed to keep most things about the air interface static. The 5G NR interface on the other hand tries to keep all options open for the future and the … Continue reading What Are 5G Bandwidth Parts?
When I’m looking into the specs to get some details on basic LTE features, I tend to look at ‘old’ 3GPP specification documents as more often than not, things are much easier to find there than in the latest and greatest versions of the same document. Here’s an interesting example: 3GPP 36.133 on LTE Radio … Continue reading 3GPP Specification Bloat
In the previous two parts on the topic I’ve been looking at why there is a need to evolve the initial 5G network architecture in which 5G base stations are merely a side-kick to the LTE access and LTE core to a pure 5G access and a 5G core network. There are several ways how … Continue reading 5G Beyond Option 3 – Pt. 3
It’s been a while since I talked about LTE based technologies for the Internet of Things (IoT) or Machine to Machine (M2M) communication. Slowly but steadily, we are now seeing NB-IoT and CAT-M1 technology deployed in practice even though I would have thought things would move faster. 3GPP has not slept in the meantime, however, … Continue reading CAT-M Evolution in 3GPP Rel. 14
And yet another 5G core network post, this time on session management and network slicing. I already had a post on network slicing from a radio network point of view a while ago but at the time it wasn’t quite clear how the 5G RAN will interact with a 5G core for network slicing. Recently, … Continue reading The 5G Core – Part 8 – Session Management and Network Slicing
We are quite a bit into January 2018 already and I still haven’t come around to reflect which things from back in 2017 ‘moved’ me. But finally here we go this is my 2017 round up from cellular to history.