SAN JOSE, Calif. — Wanshi Chen is on the hot seat for 5G.
The chairman of the 3GPP’s RAN1 committee is tasked with delivering by the end of the year a draft for the next-generation cellular radio. The spec will form the blueprint for silicon needed to make the first standard 5G connection.
On one side, carriers and their vendors are calling for the specs ASAP so they can test and launch 5G services as early as next year. On the other side, as many as 800 engineers are showing up at meetings of Chen’s group, submitting as many as 3,000 proposals per meeting in hopes of getting a feature in the spec.
“Some sessions have run as late as 1 a.m., but a typical day is 12 hours,” said Chen, a principal engineer at Qualcomm who was elected chair of RAN1 in August after nine years attending meetings, four of them as a vice chair.
“We only have two [plenary] meetings to go and tons of stuff to work out. It’s hard to predict how late the meetings will run … I hope we can make it. In the last meeting, people tried to emphasize the sense of urgency.”
In an effort to increase their chances of finishing on time, engineers agreed at that meeting two weeks ago in Sapporo, Japan, to postpone until June at least 10 features originally in the spec. “I expected more reduction of the scope … it’s not to the level I’d like to see … [the still-large feature set] makes it difficult for me to get things done,” he said.
(For a full list of proposed and postponed features, find and click on document RP-172108 at this 3GPP page.)
The idea is to capture in the December draft everything required in hardware. “Anything after December has to be optional … with no hardware impact, but it’s hard to be 100% sure we’ve done the full due diligence … different features have different interest levels from different operators and vendors,” he said. “It’s hard to converge.”
Given the uncertainty, Verizon and KT (formerly Korea Telecom) launched separate efforts developing their own specs. KT defined in June 2016 its Pyeongchang spec named for the county where it aims to provide 5G-like services during the Winter Olympics in February.
For its part, Verizon rallied Cisco, Ericsson, Intel, Nokia, Samsung, and others around its 5GTF in late 2015. The spec aims to be the foundation for a last-mile wireless service for consumers that Verizon hopes to switch on next year.
“We had to have something to test … the 3GPP timing is still suspect,” said Sanyogita Shamsunder, executive director of 5G ecosystem planning at Verizon, in a brief interview on the show floor of the Mobile World Congress Americas earlier this month.
“We will track [the 3GPP work] and we want to work with the ecosystem, but we don’t want it to be the long pole, so we will continue to develop 5GTF,” she said, noting that she still has an option of using either one as the basis for planned 5G fixed-wireless access services next year.
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