Stand-Alone 5G Deployments Seen Moving Slowly as Carriers Wrestle With Technology

Carriers are deploying stand-alone 5G, but there are challenges carriers are struggling with in early deployments, speakers said Wednesday during a TelecomTV virtual summit. So far, there have been only about 30 deployments of stand-alone 5G worldwide, said Robert Curran, Appledore consulting analyst. That’s “not that large of a number, but it is a start,” he said.

“5G stand-alone brings kind of true 5G benefits to the industry and to our customers,” said Neil McRae, chief architect at the U.K.’s BT Group. “We’re testing it, as well as deploying the software, and it’s typically cloud-native deployments,” he said. Carriers are finding stand-alone deployments more difficult than expected, he said. “It’s much more than just software -- in the core network, it’s an end-to-end capability,” he said: “This takes time. There’s an integration period. There’s a learning curve. There are adjustments. There’s tuning.” Most major carriers “are well into the process” of getting to stand-alone deployments, he said.

Carriers will need to work with their customers to address their “specific needs,” whether it's lower latency or improved reliability, McRae said: “That will take the telcos on a journey with those customers to tune, optimize and deploy those specific features or multiples of them,” he said. “What you don’t want to do is deploy SA [stand-alone] and have a worse SA experience than non-SA, and that is definitely a challenge,” he said. Building the 5G core is “pretty straightforward, it’s getting all the other pieces to come together that’s the hard part,” he said. With voice over LTE “it took us quite a while to really get the network to work so that when you’re driving down the street your calls are handing over -- we’ve got to go through a similar set of processes,” McRae said.

Getting the right spectrum bands in place worldwide slowed deployment, said Luis Fiallo, China Telecom Americas vice president. 5G isn’t getting “a huge uptake” so far because “it’s just one component” and “you have to build an ecosystem of capabilities,” he said. 5G will get more use in smart factories, but it has to be integrated with the AI and machine-learning and all the sensors already deployed on the factory floor, he said.

5G forced carriers to refocus, Fiallo said. In the past, carriers offered the core network and made it available to customers, he said. “For the first time … we’re looking at taking things from the edge, bringing it back to our core network,” he said. 5G requires a “value proposition discussion” with each major customer, one at a time, he said. The “killer app” so far for 5G is the ability to integrate IoT technology into the network, he said.

“There isn’t a single killer app,” said Appledore’s Grant Lenahan. There are two models for driving technology -- the killer app and the long-tail model, he said. “If you look at everything from YouTube, to search engines … the long-tail model, where you have a huge number of smaller applications that lead to a large distributed market, has been the real driving force,” he said.

Self-Driving Cars

A few years ago, lots of attention focused on self-driving cars, Lenahan said. That remains, at best, a future technology, he said. Other apps have been “admittedly less exciting” but also more profitable, he said. Lenahan cited use of technology for monitoring sensors, improving detection of wear on machine parts, or automating ports, mines and rail yards: “These may not be the most exciting things in the world, but they can cut maintenance costs and improve quality dramatically and that’s tremendously important.”

“We’re at the pivotal moment in 5G where we really have to realize new use cases and expand beyond mobile connectivity as we know it,” said Pedro Torres, CommScope chief technology officer-Europe outdoor wireless networks. 5G stand-alone and 5G network slicing will give carriers the capabilities and scale they need, he said.

One of the big success stories for 5Gr has been fixed wireless, as an alternative to fiber, Torres said. 5G also has business customers asking how the new generation of wireless can “solve the problems that they face every day, in their operations, in their factories, in their business,” he said. But some customers have been disappointed in the performance of early non-stand-alone deployments, he said.

Carriers “have very limited options” on installing new infrastructure, other than “aggregating the site infrastructure, adding more steel or adding more poles, and all of this is very time-consuming, it’s costly and not always possible,” Torres said: “Operators are forced to share the same pole for the active and the passive antenna and this typically comes at the expense of reusing the passive antenna, which has an impact on coverage and user experience.”