5G Stand Alone to Become Reality

London: The GSMA convened pioneers in 5G to develop a guidelines document that provides technological, spectrum and regulatory support to operators in the deployment of 5G Stand Alone (5G SA) Option 2.

Combining the high-performance of New Radio with a cloud-native core network, 5G SA realises all of the expected capabilities for 5G, high throughput, low latency, high reliability and will enable operators to expose these network features to third parties. Deployment is critical to unlocking $700 billion in enterprise opportunities and for governments to fully realise societal benefits delivered by mobile communications. Such areas include advanced public safety networks, e-education and e-health.

“The deployment of fully virtualised networks using 5G Stand Alone Cores, thereby facilitating Edge Computing and Network Slicing, will enable enterprises and governments to reap the many benefits from high throughput, ultra-low latency and IoT to improve productivity and enhance services to their customers,” said Alex Sinclair, Chief Technology Officer, GSMA.

“5G Stand Alone Option 2 can meet various and more stringent requirements and provide optimal and differentiated solutions, thereby empowering more businesses and unlocking the potential of many services. 5G is changing our society and life,” said Liu Guiqing, Executive Vice President of China Telecom.

“NTT DOCOMO has been actively promoting virtualisation of our core network; we believe that this virtualisation technology is already mature and that our operational know-how will be our advantage. In the future we expect to build dedicated networks, optimised for consumer use cases, such as AR /VR and gaming,” said Hiroyuki Oto, General Manager of Core Network Development Department, NTT DOCOMO, Inc.

The latest version of the 5G SA guidelines ‘5G Implementation Guidelines: SA Option 2 will be released 30th June at 17:00 Beijing time during Thrive China, a new virtual event from the GSMA. At this event, Alex Sinclair, Chief Technology Officer at the GSMA, will host a seminar featuring speakers from China Telecom and NTT DOCOMO. Join us to hear the experts discuss the opportunities and challenges presented by 5GSA and how these Guidelines will speed up the launch of Smart City applications, power Industry 4.0 use cases and other bespoke enterprise solutions.