The U.S. moved comparatively early on making mmWave spectrum available for 5G services with Verizon launching a pre-standard fixed wireless access service in the second half of 2018. Since then, in addition to the completion of the initial 5G New Radio standard by the 3GPP, spectrum has become available and commercialized with increasing momentum around the world; and, on the standards side, there have been continued enhancements to make mmWave more performant.
In Release 17, which was frozen relatively recently, the global standards body has expanded the frequency range of 5G NR in unlicensed frequencies from 5 GHz and 6 GHz to now include the 60 GHz band; additional frequency expansion now brings 5G into the 52.6 GHz to 71 GHz range. Also withing Release 17 is better support for inter-band uplink and downlink carrier aggregation; spatially separated full-duplex for Integrated Access and Backhaul; and support for simple repeaters to help cost-effectively and quickly expand mmWave coverage.
Looking ahead to Release 18, the 5G-Advanced era, 3GPP is working on enhanced mobility with lower handover latency and better Layer 1 and Layer 2 inter-cell mobility. Also on the table are enhancements to IABs that contemplate mobility, expansion of C-V2X into mmWave, and, drawing on Release 17 work, improvements to repeaters that add contextual information about data flows.
mmWave 5G spectrum: 2020 vs. 2022
To understand global mmWave 5G adoption trends, we’ll compare what was happening at the end of 2020 with what’s happening today in terms of commercialization and spectrum allocation.
In December 2020, U.S. operators AT&T, T-Mobile US and Verizon all had commercial mmWave 5G offerings with widely varying degrees of scale. At that same time, Japanese carriers KDDI, NTT DoCoMo and Rakuten Mobile had also deployed mmWave for commercial 5G. Singtel in Singapore also had a commercial offering at that time and Italy’s Fastweb was in the early stages of commercialization.
Fast forward to present and Claro in Puerto Rico, LGU+, KT, and SKT in Korea, APT and Chungwha in Taiwan, China Mobile and HKT in Hong Kong, and Optus and Telstra in Australia, are all in the early stages of commercialization.
Elsewhere, regulators are working to allocate mmWave frequencies for 5G services in the following countries: Argentina, Austria, Brazil, Bulgaria, Chile, China, Croatia, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Germany, Greece, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Malta, Montenegro, Netherlands, North Macedonia, Peru, Poland, Russia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Thailand, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom and Uruguay.
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