5G Updates

Though 2020 has posed many challenges for economies and consumers around the world, 5G deployments and developments continued. Many industries are putting a substantial amount of their stock in the economic potential that 5G services should provide. Given the remote working/work-from-home and remote schooling situations many continue to find themselves in, there may be an even greater emphasis for connectivity and enhanced services that 5G promises.

According to some reports, there has been a slight slowdown in investment in commercial 5G networks, but 5G network launches continued to grow each quarter of 2020. Though the pace of 5G roll-out has slowed somewhat given the strained economies of most countries around the world due to the Novel Coronavirus Pandemic, 140 operators in 59 countries/territories have launched commercial 3GPP-compatible 5G services that are either mobile or fixed-wireless access (FWA). Of those, 61 operators have invested in 5G standalone, according to a December 2020 GSA report. According to the same report, 94 operators have deployed 4×4 multi-input multi-output (MIMO) technology within their commercial networks, and at least 38 operators have deployed 8T8R MIMO and Massive MIMO technology. Moreover, the GSA report also indicates that 79 operators have deployed/launched 256 quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) for download (DL) within their commercial networks.

The report also provides details on deployment and launches of other LTE service features, such as LTE license assisted access (LAA), LTE wireless local area network (WLAN) aggregation (LWA), narrow band internet of things (NB-IoT), LTE for machines (LTE-M), and voice over LTE (VoLTE). From the data in the December 2020 report; 9 operators deployed/launch LAA networks, 3 operators deployed/launched inLTE-U, and 3 operators invested in LWA with one launch to date. Additionally, the report data shows that 226 operators have launched VoLTE services, 111 deployed/launched NB-IoT networks, and 51 have deployed/launched LTE-M networks.

Another report by Qualcomm claims that 5G deployments are accelerating globally with over 95 operators with commercial 5G deployed and another 305+ actively investing in 5G. This report also claims that over 750 million 5G smartphones will ship in 2022 with over 3.8 billion 5G smartphones to be shipped by 2024. 

These reports indicate that LTE advanced Pro (LTE-A-Pro), 5G, and other recently introduced LTE service features are still in early adoption around the world. The rate of deployment may accelerate significantly depending on the state of the global economy and government actions taken as the world continues to struggle with Covid-19 related measures. Part of the reasons for the potential to accelerate is the recent availability of highly integrated RF hardware and systems-on-chip that provide much smaller form factors and features that ease the development of 5G customer premise equipment (CPE) and 5G commercial base stations (BTS). In order to provide services to an underserved market, additional efforts have been made to trail and deploy 5G millimeter-wave (mmWave) extended-range CPE. By design these systems would be able to provide over 200 megabits per second (Mpbs) to at least 5 kilometers and beyond 2.1 gigabits per second (Gbps) within 1 km. These initiatives are part of the efforts in the United States to expand rural broadband to increase remote learning accessibility to rural communities (i.e. CARS Act and HEROES Act).

Spectrum continues to be assigned for various 5G and LTE services, but it is still too early to guess at the timelines that some features such as cellular vehicle 2 everything (C-V2X) will require to reach deployment. With the increased interest in enhancing rural broadband, there has been substantial strides in utilizing low-band spectrum, such as that from sub-1 GHz TV white space (TVWS), for use as 600 MHz LTE as it evolves to low-band 5G.