Webinar Outcomes: 3GPP Progress so far: Industry Verticals and Releases 16 and 17

This webinar zooms in on the opportunities for industry verticals to bring their inputs into 3GPP, the main standards organisation for the design of the 5G system, supporting a variety of industry verticals. The webinar talks you through how to get involved, what to know before starting and how to stay committed. It shares key insights on functionalities and features applicable across diverse industry verticals that can be used to create new services so each industry sector has its own flavour of 5G. Overall, it is an excellent introduction on how 3GPP can make a huge difference in driving the adoption of 5G, including insights from verticals that have already benefitted. 

Presentations

Welcome and Introduction, Stephanie Parker, Trust-IT and Vice-Chairperson of the 5G-IA Pre-Standardization WG with Maxime Flament, CTO, 5G Automotive Association (5GAA)

3GPP SA Status and Outlook - May 2020, Georg Mayer, 3GPP TSG Chair for SA (Services)

3GPP RAN Status and Outlook - May 2020, Balazs Bertenyi, 3GPP TSG Chair for RAN (Radio Access Network)

First-hand experiences from industry vertical Champions with Q&A

•  Michael Bahr, 5G-ACIA WG1 Chair, Siemens AG, Corporate Technology
•  Antonio Arcidiacono, Chairman 5G MAG; Director of Technology and Innovation, EBU

Takeaways

#1: Progress so far With 3GPP Releases 15 and 16, 5G technology is now in place with new ehancements, services and service harmonisation to create one network for smartphones and verticals. Release-17 features include enhancements for network slicing, edge computing, network automation and orchestration. NB-IoT enhancements; location services, drones and MC services over 5G. The huge set of new features span 5G proximity services (device-to-device communications, e.g. car to car, ship to ship, container to container. Known as sidelink in RAN); 5G multicast and broadcast; satellite integration; industrial IoT; 5G media. The integration of satellite will bring native 5G coverage all over the world and will boost 3GPP services tremendously. 

These features are not limited to a single industry but are part of a toolbox that verticals can use to cherry-pick the functionalities they need to create new services with their own flavour of 5G. 

#2: Focus inputs on Release 18 and get help New ideas and requirements now need to feed into Release-18, through 3GPP SA1 WG (Services). Industry verticals interested in getting involved should come to SA1 and get familiar with the processes there. It is important to bear in mind that standardisation work cannot be done all in one go but is a constant evolution across various phases. Staying power is an essential ingredient. To help newcomers, 3GPP organises special sessions at its plenary meetings. It also assigns mentors with different types of expertise who can support delegates from verticals with their standardisation work. Efforts are also underway to ease the process of tracking relevant work and study items so newcomers can see what has already been standardised or is being standardised. 

#3: Success factors The standards process cann't determine what is actually taken up in the market by an operator or vendor. There are though steps that verticals can take. Firstly, deploying a new product usually requires a partner to test it with. Verticals wanting to deploy a 3GPP standardised feature or functionality should talk to the operators in the room or at managerial level and help them understand the business case. Some sectors, like rail, have a longer and more complex adoption timeline as they look at a new generation of trains and implement a large set of new features together. Hence, it is even harder for operators to see when their business case will happen. When it comes to 5G rollout, it is hugely important that the different people in the ecosystem talk to each other, work out common business plans and strategies about what they want to deploy and when. It is equally important not to pursue niche solutions as the market needs economies of scale to justify the manufacturing of new devices and cannot make new products for a very small very market with very specific needs. This is an important lesson from the LTE era. This is why generic solutions equally applicable to a wide range of verticals work best. This means having a common hardware layer on the chipset side but differences on the software level and in the applications. This is the shift in mindset from 4G to 5G with its focus on common requirements. 

Webinar recording

The enhanced webinar recording is available on the 5G PPP YouTube channel here.