Ericsson: U.K. Telecom Rules May Hinder Country’s 5G Opportunity
Bloomberg reports that the U.K. risks missing the benefits of fifth-generation (5G) wireless networks, because of policies that could lead to an expensive and inefficient roll-out, according to Swedish telecommunications equipment giant Ericsson AB.
“Decisive action is needed — uncertainty is not good for business and it could delay the roll-out of the U.K.’s 5G network, putting the country’s long-term competitiveness at risk. The U.K. was late in adopting 4G and largely missed the economic opportunity that came with it. There is a real possibility of history repeating itself.” said Arun Bansal, head of the wireless equipment supplier’s European and Latin American operations.
Bansal identified several concerns with U.K. policy. He said there’s a risk the airwaves (frequency spectrum) owned by different carriers could be fragmented and inefficient. International cooperation is required so the same frequency bands are used within the country.
NOTE: It is the job of ITU-R WP5D to update ITU-R M.1036 Frequency arrangements for implementation of the terrestrial component of International Mobile Telecommunications (IMT) in the bands identified for IMT in the Radio Regulations. WP 5D gets spectrum recommendations inputs from WRC 19 meeting outputs from last Fall. A new version of M.1036 must be completed before IMT 2020 (5G) RIT/SRIT specs are approved.
The telecom regulator in each country is then responsible for assigning frequencies to each IMT service, e.g. 4G and 5G within their country. The U.K. telecom regulator is OFCOM. In the U.S. it’s the FCC.
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Bansal also noted the country’s required planning approvals are slowing engineers’ work and making it more expensive, Bloomberg reported He urged the government could do a better job at supporting 5G as a potential replacement for landline broadband, the report said.
Britain’s government rejected the criticisms and said reforms have made network deployment cheaper and easier.
In a statement, the U.K. Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport told Bloomberg that the country’s campaign to roll out gigabit-capable broadband nationwide “is technology neutral, and we would be happy to meet with the supplier to discuss the role of 5G.”
Ericsson has been positioning itself to supply British carriers with billions of pounds’ worth of 5G equipment. With U.K. officials now looking to curtail the role of its Chinese rival Huawei Technologies Co. amid growing tensions with Beijing, that potential opportunity has grown — as long as Ericsson can show it’s able to match Huawei’s technological edge.
Bansal didn’t mention Huawei by name. However, he denied claims that Ericsson was technologically behind any other player, and said it’s ready for whatever approach Britain chooses. “We ship enough 5G-ready radios to cover the greater London area every single day,” he said.
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Bansal’s allegations comes one week after O2, the London-based telecommunications services provider owned by Telefónica, selected Ericsson to deploy its 5G across the UK and upgrade the existing 2G/3G/4G sites as part of a major network modernization program.
In April, BT said it would use Ericsson equipment for the core of its 5G network. Ericsson would provide a “cloud native, containerized” core for 4G, non-standalone 5G, and eventually 5G standalone services, which will become a converged IP network.
NOTE that there are no standards or specifications for such a core network. The only 5G core spec we know of is 3GPP Release 16 specification TS.23501 5G Systems Architecture-V16.4.0 (27 March, 2020) which does not specify how to build a cloud native containerized core network.
“The containerization of core network functions will enable BT to benefit from greater industry innovation in many areas, including automation, orchestration, network resilience, security, and faster upgrade techniques,” Ericsson said at that time. “This means increasing overall network availability for customers and services while being cost-effective.”
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Last month, PYMTS reported COVID-19 has prompted Ericsson to update its forecast for worldwide 5G subscriptions to 2.8 billion by 2025 from 2.6 billion, the company said in a webinar.
“We’re witnessing transformative changes just in the last two months,” Patrik Cerwall, Ericsson’s head of strategic marketing, said in the “Unboxed Office” event that was broadcast live on Periscope.
Amy McCune, Ericsson North America’s vice president and chief operations officer, told PYMNTS in May that shifts in lifestyle, work and healthcare are accelerating the demand for the next generation of wireless communications technologies.
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References:
Ericsson Says UK Telecom Rules Are Slowing 5G Installs And Driving Up Costs
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June 16 2021 Update from LightReading:
Last year, Ericsson issued a blunt warning to Europe. Without faster progress, it risked falling behind Asia and North America on 5G rollout and the launch of new services that need 5G connectivity.
The Swedish equipment vendor says these fears have now been realized. According to data that Ericsson has shared exclusively with Light Reading, Europe this year finds itself at a worrying disadvantage to market leaders on the availability and performance of the new-generation mobile technology.
“It is not a [question of] risk today. Europe is lagging behind and at the heart of this is the deployment strategy associated with 5G midband,” says Christian Leon, who leads Ericsson’s networks and managed services units for Europe and Latin America.
Despite a wave of 5G launches in the last two years, Europe’s failure to invest in technologies compatible with midband spectrum – usually in or around the 3.5GHz frequency range – means less than 10% of people in the European Union and UK are today covered by a 5G midband network, according to Ericsson’s latest estimates.
That compares with 5G midband coverage of more than 90% in South Korea and 46% in Switzerland, one of Europe’s few high-flyers, reckons Ericsson. It also means the region is badly trailing countries including Australia, China and the US on midband availability.
Ericsson’s thesis is that European operators have tended to rely heavily on dynamic spectrum sharing (DSS) – which has allowed them to use existing and lower-band frequencies for both 4G and 5G services – without introducing midband technology. The consequence of that has been much poorer connectivity than consumers enjoy elsewhere.
Data that Ericsson has partially sourced from Ookla, which monitors network performance internationally, shows that 5G users in the UK, Germany, Spain, France and Italy can expect median 5G downlink speeds of not more than 150 Mbit/s. Connection speeds are twice as fast in China and more than 400 Mbit/s in South Korea, according to the data.
While lowband signals travel over long distances and are good for indoor coverage, higher ranges come with more spectrum and support faster connections.
“Europe has done pretty well at licensing midband and operators have stood up networks, but in nearly all cases they have not done a broad midband coverage deployment,” says Gabriel Brown, a principal analyst with Heavy Reading (a sister company to Light Reading).
One problem is that Europe’s operators do not have the same density of sites as their peers in China and South Korea, concedes Leon. China today has about 1.9 million 4G sites, of which 776,000 have been upgraded to 5G, while South Korea has 290,000 4G sites and 166,250 that can support 5G services.
Those figures indicate South Korea has about 57 sites for every 10,000 people, while China has nearly 14. The equivalent figure for Germany would be 8.7, Deloitte calculated in a 2018 report, and France’s 4G footprint of about 47,000 sites equates to a comparable ratio of just seven.
Putting Europe on the same footing as South Korea would require a huge investment that operators could not justify unless sales grew rapidly. So far, the rollout of 5G technology has not led to a substantial increase in revenues in any part of the world.
“I don’t see a big push to densify networks in Europe and what operators are hoping is that technology will solve it for them with massive MIMO,” says Heavy Reading’s Brown. “What we will see is strategic investment in certain areas and hotspots. They will incrementally densify.”
In December, Michael Trabbia, the chief technology officer of France’s Orange, told Light Reading that he hoped to avoid much 5G “densification” through the use of “more efficient technology.” Orange is basing its 5G strategy largely on deployment in the 3.4GHz to 3.8GHz bands of massive MIMO, an advanced antenna system, and it has made limited use of DSS outside Poland, Light Reading has learned.
Improvements for Orange might also come from beamforming, a technique that focuses the mobile signal on user devices, rather like a flashlight on a distant object, although Leon doubts this would really improve coverage and says beamforming is more about delivering a capacity boost.
Orange, BT and Telefónica all declined to comment on the data that Ericsson shared.
Deutsche Telekom supplied the following statement: “Our ambition is to create the best network experience for our customers wherever they are. That means to boost capacity with 5G in addition to 4G/LTE in rural areas, for example with DSS, and to bring high speed in areas where it’s really needed (e.g. more speed in dense or urban areas with more than 1Gbit/s download with 3.6GHz, ultra-low latency to the business customers or highly reliable campus networks for critical businesses).
“5G is more than an app benchmark measurement showcase, and speaking only about speed is far away from customer centricity. For us it’s the evolutionary next step to save the best customer experience in Germany, for private and for business customers.”
Innovation outside Europe
As Europe’s largest vendor of 5G products, Ericsson clearly has a vested interest in calling for greater investment. Nevertheless, the concern for regional authorities and even operators is that Europe could miss out as applications that genuinely need a 5G network start to appear.
The data gathered by Ericsson shows that China and South Korea, as well as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), are now in a far better position to support applications based on immersive augmented reality and 360-degree virtual reality.
European countries not as capable of delivering 5G experiences
https://www.lightreading.com/5g/ericsson-says-fears-about-europes-5g-lag-have-come-true/d/d-id/770228?