3GPP Must Develop Specs for Fixed Wireless, T-Mobile Says

The 3rd Generation Partnership Project should launch standards for fixed wireless access, a T-Mobile executive said Wednesday during a Mobile World Live webinar on 5G-advanced, which is the next step in 5G evolution. Egil Gronstad, T-Mobile senior director-technology development and strategy, said he’s disappointed with 3GPP and industry. “We haven’t really done anything in the 3GPP specs to specifically address” fixed wireless.

His company's plans include continuing growth in its fixed offering, Gronstad said. “We see it as a huge opportunity.” T-Mobile and other carriers are using mobile networks for FWA with specifications designed for mobility, he said. Industry should look at how to take advantage of the fact that devices are fixed “and we could probably double the capacity on the network.”

5G-advanced is more than just a “stepping stone” to 6G, said Peter Jarich, head of GSMA Intelligence. “It comes with a lot of new capabilities on the radio side of things, antenna side of things -- you see new" multiple-input and multiple-output upgrades, "enhanced mobility, new duplexing modes.” There are improvements for the metaverse, interactive communications and extended reality, he said.

The focus of 5G-advanced isn’t on completely new use cases but on enhancements, Jarich said. He also listed improvements in non-terrestrial networks being launched by carriers, reduced capability (RedCap) technology (see 2303270060) and network slicing. “This is all about an evolution.”

Carriers want improved uplink capability, better security and edge computing, Jarich said. None of that is surprising since enhancements like slicing and edge computing “are really important” to increasing business-to-business revenue and the push into new markets “that 5G was supposed to help with.” Security is increasingly important in an era of massive IoT, which means a much larger attack surface, he said.

Carriers should create realistic timelines, Jarich said. More than half of carriers that GSMA Intelligence recently surveyed said they will deploy new technology when it's available. “That’s very optimistic. We saw something similar around stand-alone [5G]. It doesn’t necessarily seem very realistic.”

Gronstad said 5G-advanced should mean new revenue streams for T-Mobile, including lower-cost IoT. Enhancements in RedCap should mean lower complexity, cost and energy usage, and better coverage, he added. T-Mobile is also interested in integrated sensing and communications. It will mean using the network “sort of as a radar system to see and feel its surroundings,” he said: “We’ll see if it makes it into 5G-advanced or not.”

5G has existed for about five years, so “whatever we do today is more advanced than what we did when we introduced 5G,” Gronstad said. Slicing and exposing application programmable interfaces are very important to T-Mobile and a major focus, he added.

5G-advanced will allow carriers to use networks as platforms, opening them to opportunities including private networks and the IoT, Sean Casey, senior vice president-product management at CSG, a software and services provider, said. The focus should be on “improving customer experience.” Operators also need to make their business support and operations support systems more dynamic, he said.