Next gen 5G rollout to rise sharply
Details
Joseph O'Halloran
| 07 July 2022
A study from global technology intelligence firm ABI Research is predicting that five years after the estimated commercial launch of 5G-Advanced networks in 2025, two years after they come in operation, as many as three-quarters of 5G base stations will be upgraded to the new standard.
5G VISTA 31 March 2022
5G-Advanced is designed to bring continuous enhancements on mobile network capabilities and support for use cases – with Ultra HD video streaming among them - to help mobile operators with 5G commercialisation, long-term development of artificial intelligence (AI)/machine learning (ML) and network energy savings for a fully automated network and a sustainable future.

Compared with previous mobile generations, 5G-Advanced G creates an ecosystem for vertical markets such as broadcast and video. Technology firms such as Ericsson, Huawei, Nokia, ZTE and Qualcomm have already trialled their solutions with mobile operators across the world. Ongoing development in this area will continue to bring improvements on traffic throughputs, network coverage, power saving and anomaly detection. The upgrade of 5G network infrastructure is expected to be faster in consumer markets like video than for enterprise applications.

ABI’s 5G-Advanced and the Road to 6G study noted that in 5G-Advanced, extended reality (XR) applications will promise monetary opportunities to both the consumer markets with use cases like gaming, video streaming, as well as enterprise opportunities such as remote working and virtual training. “XR applications are a major focus of [mobile standards body] 3GPP working groups to significantly improve XR-specific traffic performance and power consumption for the mass market adoption,” explained Gu Zhang, 5G & mobile network infrastructure principal analyst at ABI Research commenting on the study

“Another noticeable feature is AI/ML which will become essential for future networks given the predictive rapid growth in 5G network usage and use case complexities which can’t be managed by legacy optimisation approaches with presumed models. System-level network energy saving is also a critical aspect as operators need to reduce the deployment cost but assure network performance for various use cases.”