Mobile industry settles on 5G NR specification; aims for deployment by 2019

The wait is over! Today, at a plenary meeting of 3GPP's TSG RAN specifications group held in Lisbon, several players from the world mobile industry agreed upon the first implementable 5G NR (New Radio) specification; the agreement means that companies can now begin deploying 5G networks for large-scale trials and commercial deployments as early as 2019. However, it might still take a little longer for 5G networks to finally arrive in your country.

The parties to the agreement were AT&T, BT, China Mobile, China Telecom, China Unicom, Deutsche Telekom, Ericsson, Fujitsu, Huawei, Intel, KT Corporation, LG Electronics, LG Uplus, MediaTek Inc, NEC Corporation, Nokia, NTT DOCOMO, Orange, Qualcomm Technologies, Samsung Electronics, SK Telecom, Sony, Sprint, TIM, Telefonica, Telia Company, T-Mobile USA, Verizon, Vodafone, and ZTE.

The agreement comes after the world's mobile industry leaders announced their support for the acceleration of the standardization of 5G NR earlier this year in Barcelona. An agreement on a schedule acceleration for Non-Standalone 5G NR was agreed on March 9th, in Dubrovnik, Croatia.

In a statement commenting on the agreement, Bruno Jacobfeuerborn, CTO at Deutsche Telekom, said:

“We view both the Non-Standalone and Standalone modes of new Radio as equally important for the completeness of the 5G standard specification. This timely finalisation of NSA is one important step on that journey and in the development of the 5G ecosystem. It is crucial that the industry now redoubles its focus on the Standalone mode to achieve progress towards a full 5G system, we can bring key 5G innovations such as network slicing to our customers.”

5G networks have been on the minds of tech companies in the sector for quite a few years now, with companies such as Samsung building test networks as early as 2014. The speeds which 5G is technically capable of reaching is pretty mind blowing, for example, in 2005 UK researchers claimed that they managed to achieve speeds of 1Tbps.

Source: Samsung | Image via Qualcomm