As pre-standards “5G” network equipment and devices emerge to support the increasing number of trials around the world, operators and vendors see a need to ensure that a cohesive 5G ecosystem ultimately emerges. At the Global 5G Test Summit as part of Mobile World Congress, major players ranging from network operators to equipment and testing companies declared their commitment to a unified, end-to-end 5G standard and ecosystem.
The joint statement of support came from AT&T, China Mobile, NTT DoCoMo, Vodafone, Ericsson, Huawei, Intel, Keysight Technologies, MediaTek, Nokia, Qualcomm, Rohde & Schwarz, ZTE and Datang; and was supported by the International Telecommunications Union (under whose auspices 5G standards will ultimately be approved), the GSM Association, the Third Generation Partnership Project, the Next Generation Mobile Networks Alliance and the Global TD-LTE Initiative. Pre-standards 5G exploration and testing has been a major theme this week at MWC.
All of the participants affirmed their goal of “facilitating and ensuring a unified, high-quality and competitive 3GPP 5G specification by June 2018 for Release 15 and December 2019 for Release 16, building a unified 5G E2E ecosystem (including chipset, terminal, network, test instrument, etc.) for seamless global roaming and enlarging the global market scale for low cost.”
“Pre-standard, fragmented 5G specifications can distract from the end-goal and cause future roadblocks,” said Tom Keathley, SVP for wireless network architecture and design at AT&T, in a statement. “We’re collaborating closely with leaders across our industry on 5G. It’s critical that we’re all unified and aligned on this technology.”
In other 5G testing news out of MWC:
-Spirent Communications and Nokia unveiled a 5G testing-as-a-service solution two years in the making. Spirent’s 5G “Lab as a Service” has been deployed at Nokia’s facility in Oulu, Finland, with support from Spirent’s Velocity test orchestration solution. The Velocity enabled 5G LaaS has a self-service portal that Spirent says can be accessed by hundreds of simultaneous users around the world, while supporting thousands of devices and tens of thousands of 5G and legacy infrastructure connections so that Nokia engineers can “rapidly spin-up, tear down and reuse 5G hybrid test beds from anywhere in the world.” Nokia is deploying the 5G LaaS to more of its facilities.
“Our goals for the 5G Lab as a Service include automation of 5G lifecycle testing and more efficient sharing of physical and virtual test resources across teams,” said Rauno Jokelainen, VP of radio and advanced antennas at Nokia, in a statement. “Spirent’s automation expertise and Lab as a Service platform – Spirent Velocity – have been critical to our successful deployment in Oulu. We expect to achieve significant acceleration of 5G lifecycle tests along with a substantial reduction in test infrastructure costs as we deploy the 5G Lab as a Service throughout Nokia.”
-Rohde & Schwarz and MediaTek signed an agreement to jointly develop test offerings for 5G. The two companies put together a 5G proof-of-concept demonstration of beam tracking for mobile environments at 28 GHz. The partnership focuses on both millimeter wave use and over-the-air testing for massive multiple-input/multiple-output antenna arrays. Sprint this week announced plans to pursue massive MIMO trials with Nokia, and AT&T and Shenandoah Telecommunications have already been testing FDD massive MIMO.
