There are signs that 5g trial business is expected to arrive ahead of schedule in 2019, which is at least one year ahead of the previous industry consensus forecast. Does this make people feel "over anxious"? From the perspective of technology, terminal and network deployment, marketing, etc., is 5g industry really ready?

3GPP 5g standardization started in 2015. With the continuous development of technology and the communication, discussion and cooperation of all parties, the first non standalone (NSA) 5g new air port (5g NR) specification that can be implemented was successfully completed at the 3GPP TSG ran plenary meeting held in Lisbon, Portugal, on December 21, 2017, including 30 upstream and downstream enterprises of industry chain including Qualcomm, Intel and MTK that participated in the standard formulation The industry agreed that the completion of the first 5g new air port standard will open up the comprehensive development of 5g new air port for the global mobile industry and lay the foundation for the large-scale test and commercial deployment of 5g new air port as early as 2019.

The completion of this standard is regarded as an important milestone to support the efficient and comprehensive development of 5g new air port, greatly enhancing the capability of 3GPP system, and helping to create more opportunities to enter the vertical market. As the underlying specification of 5g new air port aims to support both independent (SA) and non independent 5g new air port, 3GPP decided to continue to develop release 15 on this basis, including increasing support for independent 5g new air port, so as to ensure that the global industry benefits from a large-scale single 5g new air port ecosystem.

This means that 5g has entered the countdown phase of commercial sprint since 2018.

Step by step

The reason why the event can be called "milestone" by the industry is that its influence is of great significance. According to St é phane t é ral, executive director of research and analysis, Department of mobile infrastructure & operator economics, IHS Markit, the first commercial 5g network with non independent 5g new air port will appear in the United States in the second half of 2018, and the application scenario will come from fixed wireless access. At & T and Verizon, two major carriers in North America, have announced their implementation plans.

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St é phane t é ral, executive director of research and analysis, Department of mobile infrastructure & operator economics, IHS Markit

"This means that we are all moving forward in step by step to accelerate the completion of 5g NR standard, so as to quickly enter the commercial deployment phase. The first version of 5g NR not only provides an NSA solution for the early commercial 5g deployment in the United States, but also completes the public and independent parts of NSA. As the basis of the global integrated 5g system, it has the global market scale. " St é phane t é ral said.

With the launch of the new non independent 5g air port standard, many leading mobile communication enterprises have achieved important technical milestones based on the standard. For example, Ericsson, together with Qualcomm technologies, at & T, NTT DoCoMo, orange, SK Telecom, sprint, Telstra, T-Mobile America, Verizon and Vodafone, jointly demonstrated 5g new air port multi-vendor connectivity meeting 3GPP standards, which paved the way for further launching 5g compliant commercial infrastructure and terminals. Next, Ericsson’s 5g new air port pre commercial base station and Qualcomm’s 5g new air port terminal prototype will support many operators to carry out field tests on their respective networks.

Xu Yu, director of engineering and technology of Qualcomm technologies, Inc. and head of R & D in China, said that the change of each generation of mobile technology starts from the formulation of industry standards, which can better support the efficient and comprehensive development of the new generation of wireless communication technology, including 5g. As a leading contributor in 3GPP’s development history of nearly 20 years, Qualcomm has continuously contributed its innovative 5g design to 3GPP, including OFDM based waveform, advanced channel coding, flexible frame structure, forward compatibility and many other technologies. In 2019, Qualcomm will continue to work with mobile industry partners to launch 5g new air port commercial network and commercial terminals including smart phones and other forms, while supporting 6GHz and millimeter wave band.

In an interview with international e-commerce, Intel pointed out that the formal freeze of 3GPP’s new 5g air port standard for independent networking has laid a solid foundation for the establishment of independent networking standards in the future, which marks a big step forward for the industry. With the establishment of this standard, the manufacturers in the ecosystem have reached an agreement on the internationally recognized single 5g air port system technical standard for the first time, thus laying a technical foundation for the industry to start the next generation of wireless services and equipment testing and commercialization. At present, Intel has cooperated with dozens of manufacturers to carry out 5g test using the third generation intel mobile test platform which supports the latest 5g independent networking new air port technology standard.

According to the time schedule provided by Intel, since the first 5g new air interface standard version has been determined in December 2017, the new air interface standard for independent networking is expected to be completed in September 2018. Although this is slightly different from what St é phane t é ral said in June 2018, it should be the consensus of the industry to officially complete the 5g phase I standard release 15 in 2018. After that, the significant progress that can be foreseen will also include: ITU-R wrc-19 must reach an agreement on band and spectrum between 2019 and 2020, details and technical specifications of imt-2020 should be confirmed in 2020, etc. In this way, basically the early commercial launch time of 5g should be before all standards are approved by ITU. After the first 5g standard is completely determined, the whole industry will immediately start large-scale planning based on this standard