5G defined (sort of)
One of the hot tech topics of 2015 was 5G, even though few people in telecoms agreed on what it actually is. They know what it isn’t - it’s not a relatively straightforward network RAN upgrade that would supersede the previous generation, but rather an amalgam of technologies combining everything from legacy 3G, 4G and Wi-Fi to cloud, big data analytics and network virtualization, among others - all for the purpose of delivering ubiquitous, seamless broadband to any device (all 50 billion of them) by 2020. But with different vendors promoting differing visions of what they called “5G”, there’s still a lot of confusion over what counts as 5G and what doesn’t. And operators being operators, what they really needed in 2015 was a benchmark they could get their heads around - how fast is it?
The ITU gave them the answer in June 2015. During a meeting of the ITU-R Working Party in the US, the ITU defined the goals, processes and timeline for 5G development. They even gave it a name: IMT-2020. And according to various internet reports, the ITU defined 5G as networks capable of transmitting data at up to 20 Gbps.
See Also
However, that number didn’t actually come from the ITU - not publicly. The ITU statement and links to supporting documents make no mention of data speeds or other performance benchmarks. It merely outlined the next steps in establishing “detailed technical performance requirements for the radio systems to support 5G, taking into account the needs of a wide portfolio of future scenarios and use cases, and then to specify the evaluation criteria for assessment of candidate radio interface technologies to join the IMT-2020 family. These new systems, set to become available in 2020, will usher in new paradigms in connectivity in mobile broadband wireless systems to support, for example, extremely high definition video services, real time low latency applications and the expanding realm of the Internet of Things (IoT).”
The 20 Gbps number came from the Korea Times, which cited claims form South Korea’s Ministry of Science, ICT and Future Planning that IMT-2020 networks must support data speeds up to 20 Gbps, and have a capacity to provide over 100 Mbps data rates to over 1 million IoT devices within a square kilometer.
Sister publication FierceWireless Europe contacted ITU spokesman Sanjay Acharya for clarification. Acharya said: “As of now, I understand the peak data rate of IMT-2020 for enhanced Mobile Broadband is expected to reach 10 Gbps. However, under certain conditions and scenarios, IMT-2020 would support up to 20 Gbps peak data rate.”
So between 10 Gbps and 20 Gbps, then.
LTE officially goes narrowband
All eyes were on the 3GPP in September as it proposed a narrowband version of LTE for inclusion in Release 13 that will allow LTE networks to support IoT applications with very low data rate and power consumption requirements. The technology, billed as “Narrowband IoT LTE,” is expected to be finalized in early 2016 - along with other IoT-oriented low-rate, lower-cost versions of LTE like LTE Cat 1, Cat 0 and LTE MTC.
One reason the decision raised so much interest - apart from a general eagerness by cellcos to use their LTE assets (and associated frequency bands) to cash in on the IoT - was a last-minute standards war for Narrowband IoT LTE.
Actually a number of companies have been clashing over narrowband LTE technologies for some time. But the week before the 3GPP meeting, Nokia Networks, Ericsson and Intel announced they had teamed up to back Narrow-Band Long-Term Evolution (NB-LTE), a technology seen as a direct challenge to Huawei Technologies, who backed its own Narrowband Cellular IoT (NB-CIoT), which had already gained operator support from heavy-hitters like Vodafone and China Unicom.
The main difference between NB-LTE and NB-CIoT came down to how much of existing LTE networks can be repurposed for IoT. Critics of NB-CIoT’s approach claimed that it requires new chipsets and wasn’t backwards compatible with any LTE network older than Release 13.
NB-LTE, by contrast, “can be fully integrated into existing LTE networks, works within current LTE bands and does not need an overlay network,” according to Nokia. In other words, NB-LTE uses more of the existing ecosystem and thus promises better economies of scale.
It’s a moot point now, of course - Narrowband IoT LTE in its final form is expected to use specs from both technologies.
According to Chris Taylor, director of RF and wireless components at Strategy Analytics, Narrowband IoT LTE will have a significant advantage over proprietary air interfaces for low-power wide area networking (LPWAN) technologies for M2M and IoT like SIGFOX, LoRaWAN (Long Range WAN) and Ultra Narrow Band (UNB) because of the huge base of LTE networks that will support it. Potential apps include metering, environmental and industrial monitoring, object location tracking, e-health, wearables and sensors.
“Narrowband IoT LTE would compete with other LPWAN air interfaces, but could complement local area wireless mesh networks using ZigBee, Bluetooth Smart or Z-Wave for example,” Taylor wrote in a blog post.
But while Narrowband IoT LTE is scheduled to be frozen in early 2016, there’s still a chance it may not make Release 13, Taylor added.
“The only concern we have heard so far is that including Narrowband IoT LTE in 3GPP Rel. 13 could delay the 3GPP release. Eager chip suppliers note that LTE MTC is already well defined, and provides low cost, low power consumption and coverage gains compared to LTE Cat. 0 and above, so perhaps the cellular industry should move Narrowband IoT LTE to Rel. 14.”