A couple of days ago, I had a post on the status of 5G and realistic timelines. A lot of politics is involved concerning the dates and when to do what but few technical details have so far emerged without looking deeply into the meeting minutes. Zahid Ghadialy over at the 3G4G blog, however, has … Continue reading Blog – Verizon’s 5G and a video by R&S
We are very close to calling LTE a legacy technology as the 3GPP ‘circus’ is not only moving from town to town but also full steam ahead on the new radio access (“New Radio”) and core network (“Next Generation Core Network”) specification process. Many players are publishing whitepapers these days about New Radio and the … Continue reading Current Status of 5G in 3GPP and ‘Real’ Timelines
3GPP is putting a lot of meat on the bones these days to the 5G New Radio (NR) study item. In the recent edition of TS 38.801 (Study on New Radio Access Technology) I read that the base station in 5G New Radio (NR) will be referred to as gNB. Unfortunately it is not mentioned … Continue reading 3GPP 5G NR – What’s the ‘g’ in gNB all about?
Last month I had a post about 5G heavily relying on spectrum beyond 5 GHz and the catch that today's consumer devices using such spectrum can only cover a few meters. In other words, using spectrum in the 30 or even 70 GHz range (called millimiter-waves, or mmW for short) won't work for cellular networks … Continue reading 5G Above 5GHz – More Than Just A Few Meters?
Last week, a 3GPP 5G RAN (Radio Access Network) workshop took place in Phoenix, Arizona for interested companies to voice their opinions about requirements and potential implementations of Super High Frequency Air Interfaces between 6 GHz and 100 GHz. A summary can be found here as well as a number of very interesting presentations, it's … Continue reading 5G Super High Frequency Radio Technologies Are Great, BUT…
For first and second generation mobile networks the use case was pretty simple: Let's make voice telephony wireless and mobile. For third and fourth generation networks the use case was to mobilize the Internet. Perhaps it's only in retrospect but these use cases are pretty easy to grasp. On the other hand I can still … Continue reading 5G -Separating Use Cases From Technical Debates
5G must be on the steep rise part of the Gartner Hype Cycle curve as I have heard a lot of non-technical people making a lot of technical statements out of context apart from the usual Mbit/s peak data rate claims. A prime example is the 1 millisecond round trip time that 5G should/will have … Continue reading The 1 Millisecond 5G Myth
Now that 3GPP has officially started working on 5G, the time has come to put lofty ideas and cheap talk into practical specifications. I'm looking forward to this because I still find most ideas that are currently floating around too abstract and unrealistic. But vendors and the NGMN have started publishing whitepapers that give a … Continue reading So What Exactly Is 5G?
A couple of days ago, 3GPP has published a tentative timeline for their upcoming 5G technology standardization activities in the coming years. In other words, the first steps are now made from a "what could 5G be" to "what will 5G be". The 3GPP timeline set for 5G pretty much starts today with the SA1 … Continue reading 3GPP’s Odyssey to 5G Has Begun
Unstrung recently reported that T-Mobile has started to deploy RAD’s Ethernet over DSL solution for backhauling 3.5G traffic from their UMTS / HSPA base stations. I wondered in the past how soon we would see something like this happening since current 2 MBit/s E-1 line rental costs are prohibitively high and several are required for … Continue reading T-Mobile Starts Using DSL for 3.5G HSPA Backhaul