5.5G becomes industry consensus and clear trend, says Huawei

With 6G still in early stages of research, Huawei, a Chinese multinational technology corporation, has said 5.5G has become an industry consensus and clear trend.
In his key note address at the recently held Mobile World Congress at Barcelona, Spain; Yang Chaobin, Huawei’s Senior Vice-President and President of ICT Products & Solutions, said that the industry must jointly promote 5.5G development in four areas.
Suggesting clear roadmaps for industry standardisation, he said 5.5G standardization has kicked off, with its technical specifications to be defined in 3GPP Releases 18, 19, and 20.
3GPP Release 18 will be frozen in the first half of 2024. F5.5G has progressed from proposals to specification design. Last September, ETSI released its F5G Advanced White Paper, and it has been leading the formulation of F5.5G’s first release, Release 3, which will be frozen in H1 of 2024. IETF and the IEEE have begun working on the first phase of Net5.5G standardisation mainly in Segment Routing over IPv6 (SRv6), Wi-Fi 7, 800GE, and other subjects, with an aim to release the standard in 2024.
Spectrum is fundamental to wireless networks. The 5.5G industry is now promoting sub-100GHz to support NR via a twofold strategy. First, legacy spectrum will be refarmed to ensure smooth evolution to 5.5G. Second, joint efforts will be made to ensure that large-bandwidth spectrum mmWave and the upper part of 6GHz (U6GHz) will be allocated to 5.5G.
Highlighting that 5.5G has become a common goal in the industry; he said leading operators are promoting its standardisation and technological verification.
Led by the GSMA, industry partners established a 5.5G community at the MWC Barcelona 2023. The World Broadband Association (WBBA), founded in 2022, released its “Next Generation Broadband Roadmap” white paper for F5.5G.
The leading analyst and consultancy firm Omdia released its Net5.5G white paper last September to align industry roadmaps for faster commercial progress in technical evolution, application scenarios, and industry ecosystem. On smooth evolution for maximised return on investment or ROI; he said 5.5G will support key technologies such as spectrum reframing and equipment multimode multiplexing, enabling existing 5G network resources to be integrated on demand for smooth evolution to 5.5G. “This will help protect operator investment,” he added. Stressing that with key technologies maturing and applications successfully verified, the 5.5G era is within reach; Chaobin said multiple operators around the world have successfully verified innovative technologies such as extremely large antenna array (ELAA) and Multi-band Serving Cell (MBSC), making 10Gbps a reality for 5.5G.