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5G may arrive sooner than expected

Lauren Kate Rawlins
By Lauren Kate Rawlins, ITWeb digital and innovation contributor.
Barcelona, 28 Feb 2017
5G deployment testing may start in 2019.
5G deployment testing may start in 2019.

A large group of mobile communications companies have declared their support for the acceleration of the 5G New Radio (NR) standardisation schedule. This will see large-scale trials and deployments take place within the next two years.

This was announced at Mobile World Congress, in Barcelona.

Players that are part of the agreement are: AT&T, British Telecom, Deutsche Telekom, Ericsson, Etisalat Group, Huawei, Intel, KDDI, Korea Telecom, LG Electronics, LG Uplus, NTT DOCOMO, Qualcomm, SK Telecom, Sprint, Swisscom, Telia Company, TIM, Telstra, Vivo, Vodafone and ZTE.

Cristiano Amon, executive VP at Qualcomm, says the company is already seeing the need to bring these technologies to devices globally sooner rather than later. "5G NR technologies will be critical to meet the ever-increasing connectivity requirements for emerging mobile broadband experiences such as virtual reality, augmented reality and connected cloud computing."

"Standardisation of the NR interface will be critical to the successful development of 5G over the coming years," says Luke Ibbetson, head of research and development and strategy, Vodafone Group.

"As the industry starts to design and test a new generation of services and applications, a common global standard for the underlying mobile technology will allow innovation to flourish and help us achieve economies of scale."

The deployment of 5G infrastructure was previously not thought to be possible until 2020.

However, the proposal by the players is to introduce "an intermediate milestone to complete specification documents related to a configuration called Non-Standalone 5G NR to enable large-scale trials and deployments starting in 2019," explains Qualcomm.

"Non-Standalone 5G NR will utilise the existing LTE radio and evolved packet core network as an anchor for mobility management and coverage, while adding a new 5G radio access carrier to enable certain 5G use cases starting in 2019."

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