5G commercialization may be advanced to 2019, and the industry chain will face great challenges

In the previously announced 5G development timetable in my country, 2020 has always been regarded as the starting point for 5G commercial use. However, the industry recently believes that this time point will be advanced by one year, and 5G networks will be deployed on a relatively large scale in 2019. Strictly speaking, it is the deployment of 5G pre-commercial networks. "China has a large coverage area, and even if the 5G network is a trial network, it is much larger than the network scale of foreign operators." Recently, Meng Pu, chairman of Qualcomm China, made the above statement in an interview with the media.

Hope to advance network deployment by one year

During the Electronic Information Expo, Meng Pu said that the industry had previously believed that 2020 would be the time for 5G commercialization. Now everyone has seen the benefits that 5G brings to the industry, such as support for autonomous driving and massive deployment of smart terminals. The industry has a great demand to advance the time.

At the end of February this year, Qualcomm and more than 20 major operators and manufacturers in the industry have reached an agreement within the 3GPP standards organization to solidify the 5G New Radio (NR) standard before the end of this year, laying a solid foundation for the commercial deployment of 5G in 2019, which is one year earlier than the previously recognized 5G commercialization time of 2020.

On April 6, Ericsson Northeast Asia Market Director Chang Gang also delivered the same message. He said that the 5G market will drive the development of an ecosystem, with more operators, including ICT manufacturers, and some vertical industry integrators, jointly promoting the future development of 5G. Therefore, more than 20 leading ICT manufacturers, including Ericsson, launched an initiative in Barcelona to promote the 5G standardization process more quickly. The industry originally expected that 5G would be rapidly deployed on a large scale in 2020, and this initiative hopes to achieve large-scale commercial deployment of 5G in 2019.

At the 75th 3GPP RAN General Assembly held in March, 3GPP formally approved the 5G acceleration proposal.

According to this proposal, 3GPP will accelerate the 5G New Radio (NR) standardization process in the R15 version, and advance the completion of the 5G NR non-standalone networking (option 3) feature to December 2017, six months earlier than originally planned, while the time schedule for other features remains unchanged. In addition, the conference also determined that the standalone 5G New Radio standard will be completed in June 2018 and frozen in September 2018, respectively.

The proposal has been supported by many manufacturers including AT&T, NTT DOCOMO, SK Telecom, Vodafone, Ericsson, Qualcomm, British Telecom, Telstra, Korea Telecom, Intel, LG Uplus, KDDI, LG Electronics, Telia Company, Swisscom, TIM, Etisalat Group, Huawei, Sprint, vivo, ZTE, Deutsche Telekom and others.

5G NR non-independent networking refers to 5G NR networking with LTE wireless network/EPC core network as the anchor point, which is considered to be the fastest 5G NR networking method.

Signs of industry acceleration have already appeared

In fact, there have been signs of acceleration in the 5G industry. At the "5G Global Conference" held in Beijing in June 2016, Cao Shumin, then head of the IMT-2020 (5G) Promotion Group, called on the industry to prevent the fragmentation of 5G standards and to unify the world as much as possible on 5G standards.

Why are 5G standards fragmented? This is mainly because some mobile communication operators in North America, Japan and South Korea want to deploy 5G as soon as possible due to market competition and business promotion needs. North American operators hope to solve the problem of large traffic access, while South Korean operators hope to launch 5G services in time for the Pyeongchang Winter Olympics in South Korea.

Verizon, a US operator, together with four operators including KT, SK Telecom and NTT DOCOMO of South Korea, announced the establishment of the 5G Open Trial Specification Alliance. Verizon released the Verizon version of the 5G standard (V5G) ahead of 3GPP. However, V5G cannot meet the 3GPP 5G standard in some key technologies, especially the subcarrier spacing of the 5G new air interface, which means that Verizon's V5G equipment cannot be upgraded to the 3GPP 5G standard from the hardware. Verizon hopes to use millimeter wave broadband technology to solve the problem of large traffic access, but the millimeter wave network has not yet solved the problem of mobility, so this 5G equipment can only be used for fixed wireless access. But for the entire communications market, pre-commercial equipment that is inconsistent with the 3GPP standard will appear on the market.

Huawei 5G CTO Tong Wen said in an interview with reporters at the time that in order to prevent the fragmentation of standards, the consensus is to accelerate industry development to prevent division, which involves whether 3GPP needs to adjust its timetable to cope with it.

A closer look reveals that the three major Chinese operators are not included in the acceleration proposal submitted to 3GPP. However, this does not mean that Chinese operators are not active. China Mobile has announced its 5G timetable, which is to start building a 5G test network in 2018, conduct large-scale trials in 2019, and commercialize it in 2020.

Last year, at a meeting to launch the second phase of my country's 5G technology research and experiment, Huang Yuhong, deputy director of the China Academy of Mobile Communications, said that China Mobile would make preparations for commercialization in advance. In 2017, it would select 4 to 5 cities and build about 7 sites in each city for system verification to form a pre-commercial prototype. In 2018, the number of sites would reach 20 for large-scale testing to form end-to-end commercial products and pre-commercial networks. In 2019, each pilot city would have more than 100 sites.

Chang Gang said that in fact, there are some concerns in the industry about 5G investment. When promoting 5G deployment from the perspective of operators, they hope to provide more economical and efficient methods at the regulatory level or technical level to reduce the overall investment pressure and threshold for 5G deployment.

The commercial industry chain faces challenges one year in advance

Is the industry chain ready to support commercial use one year in advance? Judging from the current situation, the challenges are still relatively large.

Qualcomm has a positive attitude towards this. Meng Pu said that in terms of 5G terminal deployment, Qualcomm has launched the industry's first 5G modem, the Snapdragon X50 modem released in October last year, which can simultaneously support 2G, 3G, 4G and 5G new air interface solutions. The chip will be available for sampling at the end of this year to support the implementation of 5G commercial terminals at the end of 2018 and in 2019. "From Qualcomm's perspective, a lot of our current investment and efforts are to support the commercial deployment and large-scale deployment of 5G new air interface systems in major markets around the world in 2019," Meng Pu said.

From the perspective of my country's overall promotion of 5G, the second phase of 5G was officially launched in September 2016, with Huawei, Ericsson, ZTE, Datang, Nokia, Shanghai Bell, Samsung and some chip and instrument companies participating in the test. China's 5G technology research and development test is specifically organized and implemented by the IMT-2020 (5G) Promotion Group, and China Mobile, China Telecom, China Unicom, Ducomo and China Academy of Information and Communications Technology form the test group. At present, the world's largest 5G test field has been planned in Huairou, Beijing, and the site planning of 30 stations has been completed, which can meet the needs of field single station and networking performance testing. At the same time, chip companies such as Spreadtrum and MTK, and instrument companies such as Keysight Technologies, Rohde & Schwarz, Datang Lianyi, and Galaxy Bright Point also participated in the test.

In mid-to-late February, Huawei took the lead in conducting field performance tests under the 3.5GHz 5G new air interface and interoperability tests with instrument/chip companies in the field test environment in Huairou, Beijing. In the field performance test, Huawei completed field performance tests of continuous wide area coverage, low latency and high reliability, low power consumption, large connections and mixed scenarios based on the unified air interface solution, achieving 10Gbps peak rate, less than 1ms air interface latency and more than 1 million connections. 5G key performance indicator requirements.

In addition, to verify Huawei's 5G new air interface technology solution, Huawei's 5G prototype system conducted interoperability tests with instrument companies such as Rohde & Schwarz, Keysight Technologies, and Datang Lianyi, and verified the parameter set, frame structure, and new waveform technologies in Huawei's new air interface technology solution based on third-party test instruments. At the same time, China Mobile, Qualcomm, and ZTE also announced that they will start interoperability testing based on the 3.5GHz 5G new air interface in the second half of this year.

At the end of March, Datang Telecom Group took the lead in launching the test. At present, the central station and core machine room have been completed, which is a complete test environment with access network, core network, edge computing, and test terminals. 5G field rate and coverage capability tests were conducted in the 3.5GHz frequency band, switching between macro base stations and densely covered small base stations, and coverage comparison for future converged networking. Currently, with the support of large-scale antenna technology, the coverage radius of 5G networks can be comparable to that of 4G, which means that once the wireless access side of the 5G network is built, 4G sites can be used for transformation and upgrading, which will greatly save network construction funds and speed up network construction.

However, there are also challenges. First, 5G technology is a systematic technology, with huge innovations in wireless access and network bearer. The solidification of the new air interface only means that the conditions on the wireless access side are basically mature, but the network slicing and NFV technologies proposed in 5G network bearer should not be deployed in 2019. Second, even on the 5G wireless access side, the maturity of the entire industry chain needs to be strengthened. For example, the key technology - large-scale antenna arrays, has very high consistency requirements on the oscillators of the basic components. Currently, there are only a few manufacturers who can provide them and the prices are also very high. Third, the 5G application of the Internet of Everything is still in the making. Internet of Vehicles, VR, and industrial robots are all in the industry cultivation period. High-traffic video applications also need 4K, 8K, and 3D technologies to mature further to drive them. It is impossible to estimate the market environment for these technologies in 2019.

Whether 5G will work in practice if it is commercialized one year ahead of schedule remains to be seen.

As a winner of Toutiao's Qingyun Plan and Baijiahao's Bai+ Plan, the 2019 Baidu Digital Author of the Year, the Baijiahao's Most Popular Author in the Technology Field, the 2019 Sogou Technology and Culture Author, and the 2021 Baijiahao Quarterly Influential Creator, he has won many awards, including the 2013 Sohu Best Industry Media Person, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Beijing Third Place, the 2015 Guangmang Experience Award, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Finals Third Place, and the 2018 Baidu Dynamic Annual Powerful Celebrity.