3GPP’s standalone 5G NR standards may be adopted this week
Samsung Electronics is hosting 3GPP’s standalone 5G New Radio (NR) standards meeting in Busan, South Korea, from May 21 to 25. This meeting, currently underway, could end with adoption of the 5G standards for 5G phase-1. Samsung announced the meeting yesterday via press release.
Representatives from telecoms and manufacturers of chips, equipment and handsets are attending to hammer out and approve the final standards. In December 2017, the international standards body adopted the non-standalone 5G NR spec, which uses an LTE RAN and core with the addition of a 5G carrier.
3GPP (3rd Generation Partnership Project) is the international standards organization responsible for industry-wide 5G standards. Broken into several groups, the RAN or radio access network meets this week. Release 15, the current standard in progress, has parts already approved. Release 15’s NSA 5GÂ standard section that mixes 4G LTE with 5G was approved in December 2017. That approval has been fueling some of the rush to 5G that has accelerated this year.
South Korea has been on the forefront of trials for 5G networks, and Samsung is second largest vendor of semiconductors after industry behemoth Intel. Samsung’s chips are 5G products, and Qualcomm uses Samsung’s 7nm process to manufacturer some of Qualcomm’s Snapdragon chips. Samsung has run several trials in 5G, including a recent multi-device trial in Japan in a baseball stadium.
The RAN working groups 1 to 5 are voting on final technologies for 5G commercialization. Topics to be voted on include 5G wireless access technology (ultra-high speed data and ultra-low latency), radio performance requirements for 5G terminals and base stations for 3.5GHz and 28GHz bands, and conformance testing for 5G terminals. Samsung chairs the RAN4 group deciding the radio performance requirements.
