Last month during Mobile World Congress 2017 in Barcelona, there were several media and press events held to demonstrate the business and consumer impacts that 5G wireless networks will have on the global economy and daily life once the networks begin to scale over the next couple of years.
We have been briefed on the multi-gigabit speeds that 5G networks are expected to provide, with companies like Qualcomm identifying the technology as a significant ?game changer? for improving medical services, connected societies, driverless vehicles and mobile banking to name a few categories. Although the fifth-generation network standard isn?t expected to be finalized until the 2019 timeframe, a new report from DigiTimes Research claims that pre-5G operations are expected to begin small-scale operations sometime next year, while US wireless carriers are preparing initial field trials during the second half of 2017.
Right now, many municipal networks around the world are still undergoing extensive investments in LTE Advanced and ?Advanced Pro? technologies, which include 3GPP Release 13 and Release 14 standards such as carrier aggregation, Enhanced Licensed Assisted Access (eLAA), Full-Dimension MIMO, Narrowband IoT, and increased flexibility across TDD and FDD frame structures. These are all expected to be implemented between the 2016 and 2020 timeframe.
The transition to pre-5G networks is expected to take place later this year and will include technologies such as millimeter-wave (mmWave) spectrum, MU-MIMO, beamforming and beam tracking. As we mentioned in December, there is growing pressure to use the 28GHz band as the international standard, as it is the only band that can distribute ultra-wide bandwidth with over 800MHz to two or three mobile network providers at once.
Reply With Quote
Bookmarks