An EE cell phone retailer, operated by BT Group, in Reading, U.Ok. in 2020.
Jason Alden | Bloomberg | Getty Images
BARCELONA — British telecommunications large BT says it expects to launch its first so-called “standalone 5G” community in 2024.
Howard Watson, BT’s chief know-how officer, instructed CNBC that the telco group plans to change on its standalone 5G community, which is commonly referred to within the trade as “true” 5G, later this 12 months.
“Others are talking about it. They’re talking about it. But we are working to get the right ecosystem in place, which means the right set of devices,” Watson stated in an interview with CNBC on the Mobile World Congress tech commerce present in Barcelona.
That comes after a trial the corporate carried out with Swedish telco infrastructure agency Ericsson and chipmaking large Qualcomm demonstrating community “slicing.” Network slicing is a configuration that enables a number of networks to be created on the identical frequent bodily community infrastructure.
“We’ve already been ensuring that the SIM cards that our customers have in their current 5G devices can do 5G standalone,” Watson added. “And so once we think there’s enough critical mass to have a real proposition, with some slicing behind it as well, we will launch that, and that will be later this year.”
What ‘5G standalone’ means
5G standalone would provide you with a slice of the community, or a certain amount of bandwidth with sure latency dedication. Each community slice is successfully an remoted a part of the community that is designed to fulfil the necessities requested by a sure utility.
So, for instance, in the event you’re a gamer and also you want super-low latency to play a recreation competitively on-line, you would use 5G standalone to get latency of 9 to 10 milliseconds, near what you get from an HTTP connection to your private home.
Latency is vital for players because it measures response delays. The increased the latency, the extra lag you get whenever you’re enjoying a recreation. This means much less clean gameplay.
“You may not want that 24 hours, seven days a week,” Watson stated. “So we might have a really flexible pricing mechanism that says you can have that from 6pm to 8pm.”
“So bringing it to life in propositions for customers is how we will market it rather than with, come and buy some ‘standalone.'”
Milind Kulkarni, vice chairman and head of InterDigital’s wi-fi labs, stated that community slicing is one step in quite a lot of technological upgrades that can result in so-called “5G Advanced,” an evolution of the 5G community.
“5G offers a fantastic platform with a lot of capability to support many use cases, and we have to continue our focus in enabling more vertical markets and increasing its capabilities as we march through 5G Advanced,” Kulkarni instructed CNBC.
5G standalone is completely different from 5G Advanced, although. 5G standalone refers back to the improvement of a 5G community that is not being constructed on prime of 4G cores. Whereas 5G Advanced is an entire evolution of the community.
BT and different community operators want to 5G standalone as a means to earn more money from the next-generation networks they first began deploying round 5 years in the past.
Future of 5G
Naturally, 5G plans are dearer than 4G.
But shoppers have been struggling to grasp the worth of 5G — which is commonly solely incrementally quicker than 4G — when many areas of the U.Ok. and developed nations nonetheless lack 5G connectivity.
To get 5G standalone networks off the bottom, community operators first want smartphone makers like Apple and Samsung to make sure their gadgets have standalone capabilities.
Apple hasn’t executed that in Europe, Watson stated, and he is holding out to see what occurs with the following iPhone to see if the tech large will make its smartphones 5G standalone-ready.
BT’s client enterprise had a significant rebrand in 2023, which targeted on the launch of a full suite of companies, an space that telco corporations have had much less success scaling than digital giants similar to Meta, Google, Apple and Amazon.
BT is the U.Ok.’s main telecom firm, working fastened and wi-fi networks throughout the nation. BT’s client division has roughly 30% market share in broadband and cell companies.
Its enterprise phase works with bigger enterprise clients.
It has been working the EE cell community since buying it for £12.5 billion in 2016.
Source: www.cnbc.com”