With “5G” customer trials and testing underway, network and customer equipment is starting to emerge into larger-scale production. Vendors took the opportunity of Mobile World Congress to showcase some of the first prestandards 5G hardware.
According to data recently released by Viavi Solutions, more than two dozen operators are lab testing 5G, and of those a dozen have also moved to field trials. Verizon Communications has already moved to “commercial-scale pilots” in 10 markets. Samsung, which is part of those trials, this week launched an “end-to-end” 5G commercial portfolio for deployment of fixed wireless services at 28 GHz. Precommercial versions of its offerings are being used in the Verizon tests, according to Derek Johnston, director of Samsung’s Networks Division, and the products will be commercially available toward the end of this year.
“We have very, very high confidence that this equipment will perform extremely well and that people will receive blazing fast services,” Johnston said. “We’re pretty excited to see the output from these consumer trials.”
Johnston told RCR Wireless News that although these products support 28 GHz, Samsung is also developing products in other millimeter wave frequencies and well as the sub-6 GHz spectrum that is part of 5G exploration. The portfolio launched this week includes a chipsets, a home router (designed to have a Wi-Fi router plugged into it, so a 5G mobile device is not needed), a small cell, a software-based core network that can be upgraded as the 5G standard evolves and network management solutions.
Samsung also demonstrated a 28 GHz implementation for an industrial internet of things use case, connecting two robotic arms via 5G radios and demonstrating guaranteed ultra-low latency to keep them operating in synchronous motion for real-time control.
“I think a lot of people are asking what’s next for 5G,” Johnston said. “We can deliver wireless broadband in the home. One of the interesting applications from an industry perspective is that you don’t necessarily have to have fiber to provide connectivity.”
The emergence of prestandards 5G equipment came even as a large group of operators and vendors reaffirmed their commitment to a unified 5G standard, and a largely overlapping contingent also said they would be supporting an accelerated work plan for the first phase of the 5G “New Radio” standard at next week’s meeting of the Third Generation Partnership Project Radio Access Network plenary meeting in Croatia. The latter group (which included operators AT&T, NTT DoCoMo, SK Telecom, Vodafone, Sprint, Telia Company, Korea Telecom, SwissCom and Deutsche Telekom) said in a statement that while the current schedule aims for a complete 5G specification by 2020, “the new proposal introduces 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. Non-Standalone 5G NR will utilize 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. The new proposal and the intermediate milestone also re-affirm and solidify the schedule for the complete standard, including Standalone 5G NR in Release 15.”
Despite all the standards efforts, however, it’s possible that as with LTE, the next-generation marketing is likely to come ahead of the technology meeting the actual specs. Some players are floating the idea that gigabit LTE may end up being branded as “5G”.
Meanwhile, ZTE introduced a prototype of the world’s first 5G-enabled gigabit smartphone, which was able to demonstrate gigabit speeds in a demo with Keysight. The company also focused on its prestandards 5G equipment, releasing both millimeter wave and sub-6 GHz base stations it says support the 5G new radio air interface. ZTE said its solutions are “scheduled for commercial predeployment starting from the third-quarter of 2018” and it expects to see deployment in commercial 5G networks in the first quarter of 2019.
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