Is 5G Advanced what 5G should have been from the start?

MWC 2023 was a successful show, returning with attendance at pre-COVID-19 levels, and home to several new announcements by infrastructure vendors, mobile operators, hyperscalers and the broader telecoms ecosystem. Huawei also hosted its analyst summit in April 2023, another event that returned after a 3-year hiatus. Many of the announcements during both events were incremental updates to existing 5G product lines, making radios and infrastructure faster, more energy efficient and smaller in volume at a lower cost. Some announcements also focused on 5G Advanced, or as some vendors call it, 5.5G, introducing new features, including Sidelink, Reduced Capability (RedCap) and Advanced Positioning. 5G Advanced is being developed by The 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) Release 18 currently and future Releases 19 and 20, after which 3GPP work will focus on 6G, which will likely be built upon the foundations that 5G and 5G Advanced have set.

5G Advanced is now bringing new innovations in existing 5G networks and will aim to deliver features that were discussed when 5G was being developed. Huawei’s 5.5G, for example, augments the enhanced Mobile Broadband (eMBB), Ultra-Reliable and Low Latency Communications (URLLC) and massive Machine Type Communications (mMTC) 5G triangle with new features:

1. Uplink Centric Broadband Communications (UCBC): This tenet improves the uplink to match its capabilities with the downlink, which has received most of the interest of the Research and Development (R&D) and standardization community so far. Advanced services, such as Augmented Reality (AR)/Virtual Reality (VR) and immersive communications require the uplink as much as the downlink and UCBC aims to improve it considerably.
2. Real-Time Broadband Communication (RTBC): The next evolution in upgrading capacity in the network with low latency capabilities.
3. Harmonized Communication and Sensing (HCS): Bringing improvements to the air interface for advanced use cases, including Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) and positioning.

These features are predominantly positioned toward enterprise applications, and other vendors are introducing similar concepts. Nokia, for example, is promoting three aspects where 5G Advanced will improve existing 5G networks:

1. Experience: 5G Advanced will make user experiences fully immersive by introducing several new improvements in the air interface.
2. Expansion: New features will introduce high-precision location, presence and timing capabilities to be able to position and identify devices in their environment.
3. Extension: 5G Advanced will bring connectivity to more areas, using satellites and other systems to bridge the digital divide.

These two vendor examples show that 5G Advanced will truly augment current networks and will not just be an incremental upgrade.

5G Advanced introduces several new features to the commercial landscape, silently increasing business opportunities in both consumer and enterprise domains. The following sections summarize a few improvements that will surely help further monetize 5G.

Faster mobile broadband

5G Advanced introduces further improvements to the air interface, in both downlink and uplink communications. These include more advanced combinations of different frequencies, New Radio Multiple Input, Multiple Output (NR-MIMO) evolution and the application of Artificial Intelligence (AI)/Machine Learning (ML) in the air interface, as well as the introduction of Millimeter Wave (mmWave) enhancements. Furthermore, advanced air interface concepts will be introduced by the time 5G Advanced is ready, including antennas based on metamaterials and more advanced Massive MIMO concepts, such as large-scale arrays. These improvements will likely push top speeds to 10 Gigabits per Second (Gbps) in the downlink and 1 Gbps in the uplink, paving the way for advanced use cases that include Extended Reality (XR), live broadcast and even holographic communications that are being discussed as a key use case for 6G.

Faster Mobile Broadband (MBB) will also enhance the value proposition of Fixed Wireless Access (FWA), currently a popular use case. This will be necessary as FWA requires a hefty part of the mobile network due to its high traffic requirement. Compared to 5G, 5G Advanced will offer a much more cost-effective deployment of high-speed capabilities, making FWA more profitable and with a better user experience.

Low and reliable latency communications

URLLC has been discussed since the conception of 5G, and 5G Advanced is the first air interface implementation. Improvements that include radio enhancements for XR, timing resiliency and many others, will guarantee that the network performs with a reliable speed and latency, making the enablement of these features a much more cost-effective exercise. In turn, this will enable advanced outdoor use cases, including those discussed above, including the long-term goal: holographic communications that mesh the physical and virtual world in a real-time manner.

IoT and V2X

3GPP Release 18 brings significant improvements to Internet of Things (IoT) features, including improvements to RedCap, which was introduced in Release 17, as well as setting the foundation for passive, or ambient IoT. In this scheme, tags become passive and harvest energy from the environment, bringing their cost down to a few cents. By introducing passive IoT, 5G Advanced includes a full suite of IoT capabilities, from using the full capabilities of the air interface for demanding applications, such as connected cameras, all the way to using passive IoT for asset management and logistics.

At the same time, 5G Advanced introduces improvements in V2X, including advanced sensing capabilities and higher uplink throughput in the air interface to enhance existing transportation use cases. Moreover, 5G Advanced will introduce Sidelink, allowing devices to use each other as relays, making the deployment of 5G Advanced in an enterprise setting even more efficient.

5G Advanced is the key to unlocking enterprise use cases

5G has now been well deployed in the consumer space, but has not yet made a mark in the enterprise domain, especially in Western markets. 5G Advanced provides improvements —mostly through software upgrades — to introduce significant enterprise capabilities. In fact, 5G Advanced will give mobile operators a comprehensive toolkit for both consumer and enterprise use cases that includes FWA, capability to offer XR services, reliable throughput and latency, a plethora of IoT capabilities, advanced positioning, Sidelink, V2X and much more.

In a way, 5G Advanced is the first implementation where both consumer and enterprise use cases are implemented in a balanced manner. The deployment and commercialization of Releases 15 and 16 have largely focused on consumer use cases and the 5G consumer market is now saturated. Release 17 will likely set the scene for enterprise applications and Release 18 — 5G Advanced — will improve their commercialization even further. In a similar manner, these 5G Advanced features will set the scene for the next generation of networks.