Much of the research into 6G, the next generation of wireless communications, is being conducted in laboratories around the world. Work to create future 6G network specifications is already being planned by the standards organization 3GPP, with an initial 6G network built on the foundation of 5G. Research institutes are busy considering 6G’s capabilities and potential use cases should it arrive commercially by 2030.
But sometime in the coming months, the mobile industry will begin to see use cases and commercial opportunities enabled from 5G-Advanced, or 5.5G, as technology supplier Huawei and others describe this new iteration. It will be.
What is a 5G-Advanced network?
Since the advent of the revolutionary 3G mobile standard, the communications world has become accustomed to the arrival of a new generation in mobile networking every decade. Each new generation of wireless technology is designed to provide significantly higher capacity and much lower latency than the previous generation, bringing with it a new range of applications and use cases not previously supported.
It’s tempting to think of 5G-Advanced as an intermediate cycle, a halfway point between 5G and 6G, but as such it brings clear performance upgrades compared to the first iteration of 5G and opens up new use cases. We support you.
Why do we need 5G-Advanced?
6G standards and networks are built to revolutionize the way consumers, networks, and devices communicate with each other. 6G will change the way networks perform tasks such as collaborative communications, sensing, and positioning. It promises to build a vital bridge between physical and virtual spaces, enabling new use cases while optimizing industry operations. The opportunities offered by 6G will form the basis of society and business in 2030, with newly integrated capabilities likely to significantly advance digitization.
However, before these 2030 societies emerge, traditional 5G networks will need to be enhanced to handle the continued significant increase in data traffic on communication networks.
What is the difference between “regular” 5G and 5G-Advanced?
5G mobile networks are now in their fifth year of commercial availability and have more than 1.5 billion users worldwide, representing about one-fifth of the market. They are designed to deliver continued enhancements to mobile network capabilities, including higher data throughput, significantly increased capacity, and lower latency.
Compared to standard 5G, 5G-Advanced is designed to enable a wider range of use cases and offer more features to enhance wireless performance to new levels, including higher bandwidth, Drive network performance enhancements for lower latency and higher reliability. This will increase support for applications such as augmented reality (XR) and financially expand the consumer market, including use cases such as gaming and video streaming, as well as enterprise opportunities such as remote work and virtual training. opportunities are guaranteed.
Compared to previous mobile generations, 5G Advanced has also built an ecosystem for vertical markets, and continuous developments in this area will continue to improve traffic throughput, network coverage, power savings, and anomaly detection. .
5G-Advanced is designed to continuously enhance mobile network capabilities and use case-based support to help mobile operators commercialize 5G. Additionally, it is the first mobile standard built specifically to leverage artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), as well as network energy savings for fully automated networks and a sustainable future.
In fact, given the predicted rapid growth in network usage and the complexity of use cases that cannot be managed by traditional optimization approaches using estimation models, AI/ML will become essential for future networks. System-level network energy savings is also an important aspect, as carriers need to reduce deployment costs while ensuring network performance across a variety of use cases.
What is the technical background of 5G-Advanced networks?
3GPP first announced details of its work on the Release 18 mobile standard, 5G-Advanced, in December 2021, specifically covering work to be done in the radio access network (RAN) domain. The 3GPP engineer will be responsible for 17 topics over his 18 months from 2022 to 2023, expanding existing RAN capabilities such as multiple input, multiple output (MIMO), coverage expansion, and 5G RedCap. I worked on it.
RedCap is designed to leverage the evolution of 5G networks to standalone (SA) network architectures to bring the benefits of 5G to New Radio (NR) consumer, business, and industrial devices. RedCap promises to provide reliability for devices with low bandwidth requirements and many of the benefits of 5G without the cost and complexity of typical 5G services.
The RedCap standard was developed to enable the manufacturing of smaller, more cost-effective 5G devices, with reduced complexity and longer battery life.
What applications and services does 5G-Advanced support?
Among related areas, 5G Advance is seen as an enabling platform for innovation in computing, AI, connectivity, sensors, and virtualization. New capabilities include harmonic communications and sensing (HCS), passive Internet of Things (IoT), and native intelligence.
The basic feature of the new standard is that it provides approximately 10 times more functionality than traditional 5G. In addition to 10Gbps downlink speeds, it will also be able to support 1Gbps uplinks.
It will likely be considered the foundation of smart city infrastructure. Self-driving car. smart traffic. New work environment. smart health. defense and security. Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Virtual/artificial/mixed/augmented reality (VR/AR/MR/XR), especially the industrial metaverse.
Passive IoT is seen as a potentially huge opportunity. In 2022, Huawei will collaborate with China Mobile in Chengdu, Sichuan Province, China to conduct field tests of passive IoT running on a prototype 5G advanced network, allowing large numbers of sensors to transmit data without the need for batteries. I did it like that.
When might 5G-Advanced networks be launched?
3GPP aims to complete the standard by the end of the third quarter of 2023, and technology companies expect services to begin in late 2024. All spectrum bands have been identified and terminal technology is mature.
At MWC 2024, Tim Hutt, head of research and consulting at global mobile industry trade association GSMA, said 2024 will be a big year for the mobile sector as the industry grapples with what’s next for 5G, with the impending rollout of 5G advanced networks. He said it will be a very important year. – The earliest ever introduced generation of mobile technology.
Also at the show, communications technology giant Huawei revealed its plans to utilize 5.5G/5G-Advanced. Eric Chao, Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer of Wireless Solutions at Huawei, said the industry is on a new 5G journey, and the era of 5.5G is now, with native 10Gbps connectivity, native green technology, and more. , and offered a perspective on native services. Intelligence. Huawei predicts 100 billion 5.5G connections supporting the “ultimate” and “ubiquitous” experience.
ABI Research’s 2023 study predicts that 5G-Advanced will grow rapidly after commercialization in 2025, with 75% of mobile base stations being upgraded to support the standard by 2030. It has been.
5G network infrastructure upgrades are expected to be faster for consumer markets than for enterprise applications. According to a study by ABI Research, The road to 5G-Advanced and 6Gpredicts that 75% of all 5G base stations will be upgraded to 5G-Advanced, but in the enterprise market that proportion will be about half. The company expects that its 5G-Advanced devices per wireless base station will be in the early stages of commercial launch from 2024 to 2026, with rapid adoption. This is because devices grow more aggressively than network deployments during this period.
Where is 5G Advanced research and development happening?
The ecosystem of technology suppliers for 5G-Advanced networks is growing. However, the usual suspects are Nokia, Ericsson, Huawei and Samsung, the communications technology and service providers that are leading the development of the essential systems underlying 5G-Advanced.
Importantly, mainstream technology suppliers have now completed multiple iterations of 5.5G support. Qualcomm and MTK are both mentioned in terms of chipsets, while Apple’s iPhone 15, Samsung Galaxy S24, Vivo’s X100 Pro, and Oppo’s Find 7 lead the way in the device and handset market.
More than 50 carriers have mmWave networks ready to support 5G-Advanced, and some, including DNA Finland, VDF Spain, HKT Hong Kong, and AIS Thailand, already have 10Gbps connectivity. testing mmWave networks. The availability of licensed spectrum is critical to the successful deployment of 5G-Advanced.
2023 White Paper from mobile industry association 5G Americas; Evolution of 5G spectrumhighlights that the upper midband spectrum, ranging from 7.125GHz to 15.35GHz, is key to leveraging existing infrastructure to increase capacity.
What are the early 5G-Advanced projects?
Telcos in the Middle East were among the first to deploy early versions of 5G-Advanced. UAE telecommunications operator Du is developing 5G advanced technology to expand large-scale commercial use of new services in all scenarios, including consumers, homes and businesses, and accelerate the incubation of commercial applications such as 24K. We are establishing a 5G Advanced Collaborative Innovation Center. XR, FWA, holographic conferencing, and his enhanced 5G private network.
China Unicom, which is looking to profit from passive IoT that enables 100 billion low-speed connections, has already launched a pilot program for Shanghai steel company Baowu Ouyeel, which will improve the handling of steel roll receiving, stocking and warehousing. Supports transparent management of all processes. Such networks reduce the cost of a typical IoT device from RMB 150 (£16.40) to less than RMB 10 (£1.09), have a claimed part counting accuracy of 99.99%, and increase counting efficiency to several Hours turned into minutes.
