Very few operators have yet deployed 5G Standalone (SA) commercially. There are some notable at-scale exceptions such as T-Mobile USA, and some more limited implementations such as Telstra’s in Australia.
But despite the challenges of deploying the 5G core, preferably in a cloud-native manner (but when available platforms are immature), there should be a trickle of SA announcements this year, as operators seek to improve their 5G return on investment. This will be helped because the 5G core and SA can support advanced enterprise and consumer services enabled by slicing, while SA boosts user experience and spectral efficiency.
Claiming the European first is Vodafone Germany, whose CEO, Hannes Ametsreiter, said last week: “We are the first network operator to put aside the LTE support wheels for 5G — not for internal tests, but for our customers who can experience real time connections.”
Real time response, and even ultra-low latency support for some critical enterprise services, is at the heart of the business case for Vodafone’s early upgrade, as it looks to steal a march in a country where the large manufacturing and industrial base is particularly heavily focused on 5G. Industries can apply for their own midband 5G spectrum, under rules introduced in 2019 by the regulator, and are positioning 5G as a key element of their Industrie 4.0 plans. This has seen the MNOs jostling to retain a key role in deployments, even where their spectrum is no longer required.
“We are clearing the way for real time connectivity. 5G is standing on its own two feet in Germany for the first time,” said Ametsreiter in a statement. In tests of the commercial network in Frankfurt, Germany’s fifth city, Vodafone said latency was reduced to 10-15ms even in crowded environments – supported by the fact that the first 5G core data center is in the city.
At launch, the 5G SA network will consist of 1,000 new antennas in the 3.5 GHz band, covering parts of 170 cities. The equipment for the RAN and the new 5G core came from Ericsson and Nokia.
The next step will be to implement network slicing and so be able to provision virtual networks with guaranteed data rates and latency levels, and with performance tailored to the customer’s requirements.
“5G improves mobile communications in three dimensions. So far, it has mainly been about higher bandwidths. We are now setting the go-ahead for ultra-low delay times and network slicing in Germany,” said Vodafone Germany’s CTO Gerhard Mack.
Vodafone Germany and its closest competitor Deutsche Telekom activated the first 5G services in limited areas across Germany within the span of two weeks in the summer of 2019. Until now, both operators have relied heavily on dynamic spectrum sharing (DSS) to boost 5G coverage on their existing 3G and 4G LTE footprints.
As well as lower latency and slicing, the use of the 5G core reduces the system overhead incurred by dual connectivity and dynamic spectrum sharing – a useful but processing-intensive technique to allow LTE spectrum to be used flexibly for both 4G and 5G. The 5G SA architecture also enables wider coverage radius from the same site grid, as well as boosts to data rates and availability.