Major telecommunication operators and vendors in the world have committed to a unified 5G ecosystem. The companies made the announcement at the Global 5G Test Summit during the World Mobile Congress in Barcelona.
They jointly declared to promote a unified, global 5G standards achieved through 5G testing, trials, and cooperation between telecom operators, vendors and vertical industry partners to build a unified end-to-end (E2E) ecosystem.
The companies included Huawei, AT&T, China Mobile, NTT DOCOMO, Vodafone, Ericsson, Intel, Keysight, MediaTek, Nokia, Qualcomm, Rohde & Schwarz, ZTE, and Datang.
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“Thinking 10 years ahead and pushing the limits of technology, we imagine a Future X Network that is a 10-fold improvement across key technology domains,” said Mr. Risto Siilasmaa, Chairman of Nokia. “We are connecting everything, everyone and every system and process with a network that will enable us to explore and interact with information in new and useful ways.” Ryan Ding, President of Products and Solutions at Huawei, said.
The Global 5G Test Summit was hosted by four leading telecom operators and supported by ITU, GSMA, 3GPP, NGMN and GTI, a unified E2E ecosystem and a thriving 5G market.
After standardization, testing and trials are vital to the success of 5G technologies, ecosystem development, and cross-industry innovation. To achieve this goal, the participants committed to facilitating and ensuring a unified, high-quality and competitive 3GPP 5G specification by June 2018 for release 15 and December 2019 for release 16. They also committed to building a unified 5G E2E ecosystem (including chipset, terminal, network, test instrument, etc.) for seamless global roaming, and enlarging the global market scale for a low cost.
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“GTI has contributed greatly to the development of the 4G industry. We look forward to GTI assuming an even more active role in the development of the 5G industry,” said Huawei Deputy Chairman and Rotating CEO Eric Xu. “We must live up to our historic mission and continue our collaborative efforts to give 5G greater vitality and a longer life cycle. Only with greater vitality and a longer life cycle will 5G provide better returns on investment to investors.”
Participants are starting the early trial and interoperability testing for a variety of use cases, including mobile broadband, for 3GPP Release 15 specifications to drive a mature 5G ecosystem and to ensure a quick and efficient time to market. They also appealed to inspire innovations on 5G key technology and to validate the smooth evolution capability of technologies towards 5G, including 3D-MIMO LTE, NB-IoT/eMTC, and C-V2X.
