Companies could see a reduction in investment costs and improved customer experience thanks to an advance in 5G decoupling over an end-to-end network from Huawei and BT’s EE.
Huawei showcased a 5G deployment with 5G New Radio and LTE co-site deployment to separate uplink and downlink (UL/DL) on different bands at the Global Mobile Broadband Forum in London on Thursday. C-band coverage and UX is improved through use of LTE/4G bands carrying 5G uplink data. The decoupling enables C-band and 1.8GHz co-site deployment with the same coverage. The technology will be
standardized in 3GPP R15.
In 5G C-Band deployments uplink coverage can be severely limited compared to downlink coverage owing to higher bands and greater power gaps between sites and terminals, according to the companies. The telco firms are eager for prominence in the 5G sector amid jostling competition from US-based Verizon, Qualcomm and Ericsson among others. Nokia plans to phase in some 5G capabilities by 2019, perhaps supported by its 2016 acquisition of a 92% ownership stake in Alcatel Lucent, reports Investopedia.
Fotis Karonis, BT TSO, Mobile and Voice Unit Managing Director, said the first proof of concept is “an excellent achievement” which is key in order to “maximise the potential” of 5G for businesses.
Yang Chaobin, president of Huawei’s 5G product line, said: “In the 5G era, the available bands for operators will increase, and the coverage of higher bands such as C-band will become a major barrier to deployment.”
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Mr Chaobin said “use of multi-band coordination” as crucial to circumventing the “higher band coverage bottleneck”.
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The launch follows up on BT and Huawei’s announced plans to develop 5G technologies to jointly push standards through 3GPP.
While the design of suitable 5G architecture was addressed by 5G-PPP Phase 1 projects at a conceptual level (for example, 5G-NORMA and METIS II), the technology must be brought into practice in Phase 2. To this end, 5G-MoNArch will evolve 5G-PPP Phase 1 concepts to a fully-fledged architecture, developing prototype implementations for representative use cases.
