5G: Almost here

Last year’s Mobile World Congress (MWC) focused on 5G from a fixed wireless access perspective, with several stands showing off equipment intended to serve this use-case. While there was still some news around this topic at this year’s event, with Huawei saying that it will launch 2Gbps-throughput 5G commercial consumer premise equipment (CPE) this year as part of that use-case, there was also a bit more visibility around handsets. The same company announced that it intends to introduce a 5Gbps-throughput 5G smartphone to the market next year, and there is a sense that much of the R&D effort across the industry is shifting to mobility.

“In the world of 5G, the clear focus is on enhanced mobile broadband, and the December 2017 release [the early completion of the 3GPP standard for non-standalone 5G New Radio] was fully focused on that,” said Jonathan Borrill, Anritsu’s director, engineering and technology. He added that one of the remaining big challenges is the development of a standardised and interoperable way of doing and managing the beamforming and beamtracking required for millimetre wave mobility. When someone with a millimetre wave handset is on the move, the network needs to manage the beam directed at the device, while also having a candidate beam ready to replace the main beam, should it become blocked. However, he added that streaming 4K video is probably possible at sub-6GHz using multi-user MIMO without the need for the above.