3GPP Says 5G Radio Specifications Will Be Available By June 2018

The 3GPP (Third Generation Partnership Project); the body works within the scope of the ITU (International Telecommunication Union) to develop 3rd (including  future technologies like 4G, 5G and beyond ) generation wireless technologies has released a timeline for its Release 15 otherwise known as specifications for 5G. The 3GPP Technical Specifications Group concluded a series of milestones leading up to June 2018.

Source: 3GPP

3GPP TSG RAN further agreed that the target NR scope for Release 15 includes support of the following:

• Standalone and Non-Standalone NR operation (with work for both starting in conjunction and running together)
  • Non-standalone NR in this context implies using LTE as control plane anchor. Standalone NR implies full control plane capability for NR.
  • Some potential architecture configuration options are shown in RP-161266for information and will be analyzed further during the study

• Target usecases: Enhanced Mobile Broadband (eMBB), as well as Low Latency and High Reliability to enable some Ultra-Reliable and Low Latency Communications (URLCC) usecases
• Frequency ranges below 6GHz and above 6GHz

“We now have a more concrete plan to guide the studies in the Working Groups and to put us in the position to address both short term and long term opportunities of 5G,” said Dino Flore, Chairman of 3GPP TSG RAN. “3GPP continues to actively coordinate radio access NR and Next Generation system level work to standardize target services on schedule” said Erik Guttman, Chairman of 3GPP TSG SA.

This is all part of the ITU’s vision to make 5G a reality by 2020 even as networks have started carrying out tests globally on it. 5G is expected to be 10-100 times faster than today’s average 4G LTE connections. That means you might be able to download a video files including your popular TV series in 3 seconds or less. Imagine that. In a USA today report, according to Verizon 5G will deliver up to about 50 times the throughput of current 4G LTE, with latency down to the single milliseconds.