By Diana Goovaerts
Ericsson anticipates standalone 5G revolution
Fredrik Jejdling, EVP and head of Business Area Networks, tipped a forthcoming shift to standalone 5G to bring with it a fresh wave of new capabilities and innovation.
The executive (pictured) told Mobile World Daily operators are expected to begin deploying standalone 5G early next year, a move he said will consist primarily of software upgrades to the network core.
He explained the move to a standalone 5G core will enable “network slicing on a completely different level,” allowing operators to deploy different types of slices much quicker to allocate specific resources required by different use cases.
“It’s a completely new different service-based architecture that acts and behaves completely different to what we’ve done with core so far…The 5G core is the next, I think, big evolution on 5G when you get those kind of functionalities offered by your core network.”
He pointed to the US and Korea as pioneering 5G advances, but added all operators are expected to move to a standalone core eventually.
With or without a standalone core, Jejdling flagged 5G as the “biggest innovation we’ve ever done” which will lay the foundation for even more transformational technologies and applications.
However, he noted “the use cases are maybe not so tangible for us as the 4G use case was because it sits in your hand. 5G has to do with connected things, a lot more about industrial use cases and others we’re trialling right now.”
