It may be only a year since 5G really started to be rolled out at scale in many markets, but already the telecoms world – or at least its hype machine – is bored with plain old 5G. The R&D projects and even deployment commitments for 6G are piling up along with the political posturing from the leading hi-tech nations. Operators, particularly in the USA, are already labelling certain services ‘5G-plus’ or similarly inflated titles. Huawei made ‘5.5G’ the centerpiece of its global analyst summit, held last week (see below).
But there is interesting reality beneath the hype. ‘5.5G’ may recall previous 4G attempts by vendors to persuade customers they were more advanced than their rivals, but these sometimes turn out to be more than marketing (where vendors are concerned, more than operators). Huawei has a particular need to position itself as the most advanced supplier, of course, so that operators and governments – Romania being the latest to impose 5G ban on the Chinese giant – become worried at what they are missing.
Huawei’s label does not merely apply to support for standard features in forthcoming 3GPP releases (17 and beyond) – it shifts the focal points of the 5G world by adding three new use cases to the famous triangle (of eMBB, mMTC and URLLC), and by emphasizing uplink, which is usually both more difficult and more neglected in each mobile generation.
The Chinese firm is not the only one refocusing on the importance of addressing uplink challenges, not just to support the increasingly symmetrical nature of consumer traffic in areas such as social video, but also to enable optimal performance for many enterprise and industrial applications. Ericsson announced trials that used multiuser MIMO to improve 5G uplink, while Mavenir and Xilinx are also focused on boosting uplink, among other enhancements, with their Massive MIMO partnership (see below).
So there is plenty of reality behind the progression to a next phase of 5G, even if it does not necessarily require a new label. Just as ‘3.5G’ (HSPA) and ‘4.5G’ (LTE-Advanced) finally achieved the performance promised for 3G and 4G – with the initial implementations falling somewhat short – so it is with 5G. The first wave of 5G really has been ‘4G-plus’, since it has still used the LTE core, thanks to the short-cut deployments enabled by the 5G NR Non-Standalone (NSA) technology. The next big milestone will actually take operators to ‘real 5G’ – 5G Standalone (SA) with the 5G core, and so the ability to support key technologies such as network slicing and ultra-low latency.
Vodafone Germany became the first European operator to switch on a commercial SA network last week, not too far behind T-Mobile in the USA and China Mobile. Ericsson and Qualcomm were separately showing off dual connectivity technologies to allow LTE networks to be supported in a 5G SA environment (see 5G Watch).
Such achievements are more important to the 5G business case, in the short and medium term, than grand visions of 6G, and they are no less challenging for being predictable. And the next steps go well beyond the 3GPP standards. Other organizations are adding new layers and richness to the platform, from the open initiatives such as Open Networking Foundation and O-RAN Alliance, to standards bodies and industry alliances in other sectors. The Broadband Forum’s contribution to 5G standards such as the Access Gateway Function, and CableLabs’ new work on 5G/wireline convergence, both highlight the fact that, with the 5G core, the 5G network becomes multi-access and has the potential to impact the business models of service providers that live outside the MNO market, in wireline, enterprise or unlicensed spectrum markets.