5G was front and centre at this
year's Mobile World Congress, which concluded on March 2nd. Last year, 5G was
already on the tip of everyone's tongue, while this year 5G banners were all
over Barcelona, from the arrival lounge at the airport to nearly every vendor
stand. There is considerable industry pressure to move as quickly as possible
to bring 5G to market and MWC 17 kicked off with a call by major mobile network
operators and vendors to accelerate the 5G New Radio (NR) standardisation
schedule to enable large-scale trials and deployments as early as 2019, a year
earlier than the previous expected timeline.
The first 3GPP 5G NR specification
will be part of Release 15, the global 5G standard that will make use of both
sub-6 GHz and mmWave spectrum bands. An accelerated rollout for 5G could
provide a strategic market advantage to certain carriers who gain a
first-to-market advantage with new applications such as autonomous vehicles and
fixed wireless access for residential services. Early deployments would also be
welcomed by major vendors, many of which are under increasing financial
pressure as new LTE installations dry up.
However, there is also a growing
back pressure from some quarters, notably European operators and some
regulators, not to rush things for the sake of boastfulness at the expense of
technology maturity or market reality. In particular, the CTO of Telefonica was
quoted in the industry press as saying that a premature lockdown of 5G
specifications might prevent the technology from developing to its full
potential.
Mobile operators racing to be
first
In the highly competitive U.S.
market, key players in 5G include Verizon,
and perhaps to a slightly lesser extent AT&T.
For Verizon, it is essential that it retains a network advantage over Sprint
and T-Mobile. Sprint's current advertising campaign proclaiming that its
network quality is within 1% of Verizon's is painful enough to the market
leader, and falling behind with 5G would be disastrous. Ahead of MWC 17,
Verizon announced plans to rollout 5G pre-commercial services to select
customers in 11 markets by mid-2017 to create the 'largest 5G proving ground in
the world'. The rollout will include several hundred cell sites that cover several
thousand customer locations, with pilot markets including Ann Arbor, Atlanta,
Bernardsville (New Jersey), Brockton (Massachusetts), Dallas, Denver, Houston,
Miami, Sacramento, Seattle and Washington DC. Verizon's 5GTF ecosystem partners
include Ericsson, Intel, Qualcomm Technologies and Samsung.
For AT&T, the first 5G business
customer trial is already underway in Austin, Texas. The pilot, being conducted
in partnership with Intel and Ericsson, uses millimetre wave (mmWave)
technology, which can deliver multi-gigabit speeds using unlicensed spectrum.
The carrier has previously reported 5G lab trials delivering speeds of up to 14
Gbit/s with less than 3 milliseconds of latency. In the first half of 2017,
AT&T plans to conduct a trial in Austin, where residential customers can
stream DIRECTV NOW video service over a fixed wireless 5G connection. The trial
will include next-generation entertainment services over fixed 5G connections
and is designed to evaluate how fixed wireless mmWave technology handles heavy
video traffic.
Meanwhile in Australia, for Telstra
being first to market with leading technology has also become a hallmark of the
company, and Telstra was among the major carriers calling to accelerate the 5G NR
standardisation schedule. Telstra has launched commercial gigabit LTE service
is select capital cities across Australia enabled by LTE Advanced features
including 4 x 4 MIMO, 3 CA (Carrier Aggregation) and higher order modulation
(256QAM). Ericsson is a key technology provider for the rollout, with Qualcomm also
a key partner.
For Korean carriers, including SK
Telecom and KT,
both of whom were early movers with LTE, one could say there is a national
imperative to lead in 5G. The next winter Olympic Games, scheduled for February
2018, in PyeongChang, Korea, are supposed to showcase commercial 5G service. KT
has previously announced plans for commercial 5G in 2019, a year earlier than
others, and is also a 5G development partner with Verizon, along with vendors
Ericsson and ZTE. SK Telecom likewise has announced plans for 5G NR field
trials in the second half of 2017 with the goal of showcasing the technology at
the Winter Games. These upcoming trials will employ 3GPP 5G NR MIMO antenna
technology with adaptive beamforming and beam tracking techniques, including non-line-of-sight
(NLOS) environments and device mobility. Vendor partners again include Qualcomm
and Ericsson.
In Japan, NTT
DOCOMO has previously stated its intention to roll out commercial 5G
services across Japan ahead of the 2020 Olympic Games in Tokyo. At MWC 17, NTT
DOCOMO announced interoperability testing and over-the-air field trials in
Japan based on the 5G NR specifications being developed by 3GPP. The trials
will operate in mid-band spectrum at 4.5 GHz, as well as mmWave spectrum at 28
GHz, showcasing the unified 5G NR design across diverse spectrum bands. The
trials will utilise device prototype and base station solutions from Qualcomm
Technologies and Ericsson, respectively, along with trial environments from NTT
DOCOMO to simulate real-world scenarios across a broad set of use cases and
deployment scenarios.
DOCOMO said It is looking forward
to timely commercial network launches based on 3GPP Release 15 standard-compliant
5G NR infrastructure and devices. The trial will showcase advanced 3GPP 5G NR
technologies including MIMO antenna technology, beamforming techniques,
adaptive self-contained TDD, scalable OFDM-based waveforms to support wider bandwidths,
advanced coding and modulation schemes and a new flexible, low-latency slot
structure based design. In addition, the trial will feature 5G NR operation in
mmWave spectrum at 28 GHz, employing advanced 5G NR antenna technology to
deliver robust and sustained mobile broadband communications including in non-line-of-sight
(NLOS) environments and device mobility.
Vendors race to be first
Among vendors, there are also
bragging rights and strategic imperatives at play, For Ericsson,
5G is the really the big bet that is keeping the company alive. The Ericsson
stand at MWC was mostly a showcase for its 5G ambitions, and for Ericsson this
future cannot come fast enough. The company's recent financial performance and
on-going restructuring are no secret, with Q4 2016 revenue down 11% compared to
a year earlier and the company reporting a climate of weak investments in
mobile broadband in most regions of the world with many legacy 4G projects
having wrapped up. At MWC 17, Ericsson showcased a 5G platform comprising the
5G core, radio and transport portfolios, together with digital support systems,
transformation services and security, all clearly aimed at mobile operators
seeking to be first movers in their markets.
For Nokia,
the 5G imperative story is pretty much the same, although the company benefits
from a more diverse product portfolio that includes IP and optical platforms
that will sustain the company in the event that a 5G rollout is delayed or more
gradual than expected. At MWC 17, Nokia also said it intends to give operators
a first-to-market advantage based on early specifications. The company
announced its 5G FIRST end-to-end solution incorporating its AirScale and
AirFrame technology, including AirScale massive MIMO Adaptive Antenna, Cloud
Packet Core and mobile transport. The solution is expected to launch in the
second half of 2017.
For Huawei
and ZTE,
5G is the opportunity to pull ahead of their western counterparts by being
first to market. At MWC, ZTE demonstrated a range of 5G mmWave and sub-6 GHz
pre-commercial base stations supporting 3GPP's 5G NR new air interfaces and
mainstream 5G frequency bands. The base stations use massive MIMO, beam tracking,
beamforming and other key 5G technologies to achieve a 50 Gbit/s peak rate. ZTE
completed its first 5G mmWave field trials last year. ZTE also showed off an
upcoming 5G-capable Gigabit Phone powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon 835
chipset and which combines wireless carrier aggregation with 4 x 4 MIMO antenna
technology and 256QAM modulation. Some may say this device is really pre-5G
because it uses technology that is becoming available for 4G LTE, yet the
announcement indicates that ZTE believes 5G handsets will be crucial for rapid
upgrades to 5G infrastructure.
The issue of 5G handsets and other
devices leads to Qualcomm, for whom it would simply be unacceptable to lose its
lead. Anyone walking in to Barcelona's Fira convention centre saw dozens of
banners proclaiming 'Snapdragon Gigabit LTE - first place in the race'. A rapid
adoption of 5G NR would certainly be welcome by the California-based silicon
vendor. In October 2016 Qualcomm made the first commercial 5G modem chipset
announcement with its Snapdragon X50 5G modem, clearly aimed at operators and
OEMs conducting lab tests, field trials and early deployments. The Snapdragon
X50 5G modem initially supports operation in mmWave spectrum in the 28 GHz band
and employs MIMO antenna technology with adaptive beamforming and beam tracking
techniques for NLOS environments. It also offers 800 MHz bandwidth support for
peak download speeds of up to 5 Gbit/s.
At MWC 17, Qualcomm announced support
for the 5G NR accelerated plan and is expanding its Snapdragon X50 5G modem
family to include 5G NR multi-mode chipset solutions compliant with the
3GPP-based 5G NR global system supporting operation in the sub-6 GHz and
multi-band mmWave spectrum. This includes support of both Non-Standalone (NSA)
operation (where control signalling is sent over LTE), and Standalone (SA)
operation (where all control signalling and user data are sent over 5G NR), and
are designed to enable the next generation of premium-tier mobile cellular
devices while also aiding operators to execute early 5G trials and deployments.
The first commercial products integrating 5G NR modems from the Snapdragon X50
family are expected to be available to support the first large-scale 5G NR trials
and commercial network launches starting in 2019.
Big questions remain
The question remains, is there a
business case for an accelerated adoption of 5G? The upgrade to 4G brought with
it concurrent improvements to the overall network infrastructure; 5G is being
preceded with network advancements, including network virtualisation
technologies, open systems, and even continued improvements of the underlying
metro optical transport network. In addition, 4.5G technologies such as carrier
aggregation and MIMO are already adding significant capacity to mobile
networks. The chief financial officers of the mobile network operators will
look at this and ask whether there are in fact end customers willing to pay to
be the first aboard fully 5G commercial services.
Perhaps there are certain
customers, like the operators of fully-autonomous vehicle fleets, that are eager
to sign up for the first available 5G service, but for now it looks as though
certain vendors and operators are pressing full-steam ahead because they have
no other choice than to be first with 5G.
