Huawei and Intel announced they have completed a standalone 5G call test based on 3GPP Release 15 spec for the third phase of China’s 5G technology R&D trials.

The trial, organized by China’s IMT-2020 promotion group, was conducted at the group’s laboratory using a Huawei 5G base station and core network and Intel’s 3rd generation “5G Mobile Trial Platform.”  (It’s astonishing that it’s the 3rd generation of 5G when the IMT 2020 5G standard won’t be completed for over two years!)

Utilizing the 3.5-GHz frequency band, Huawei and Intel tested full stack initial access, registration and radio bearer establishment with the 5G new radio resource control (NR RCC) and non-access stratum (NR NAS) protocol stack.

Intel and Huawei completed non-standalone 5G interoperability and development testing in June in collaboration with China Mobile, and the two vendors commenced field trials for China’s third-phase 5G R&D test in August.

“Huawei will continue focus on system commercialization in the Third-Phase 5G R&D test, and together with industry partners will promote 5G business success,”  Yang added.

“The completion of the SA (stand alone) test, based on the R15 protocol, is another important milestone for Huawei in China’s third-phase 5G R&D test. Huawei will continue focus on system commercialization in the 5G R&D test, and together with industry partners will promote 5G business success,” said Yang Chaobin, president of Huawei’s 5G product line.

“Intel’s 5G Mobile Trial Platform has been a key technology in enabling global 5G testing and will help to define the future use cases for 5G. Now that the interoperability test for the Standalone architecture in the third-phase 5G R&D test has been completed, we are a step closer to the commercialization of 5G and to delivering the powerful user experiences that it will bring,” said Asha Keddy, VP and GM of next generation and standards at Intel.

China’s national 5G tests:

China’s 5G R&D tests, which are being carried out by the IMT-2020 (5G) promotion group, started in 2016 and are expected to be concluded by the end of this year. These tests involve three phases: key technologies testing, the verification of technology and solution and 5G system verification.

The IMT-2020 (5G) promotion group was jointly established in 2013 by the Chinese Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, the National Development and Reform Commission, and the Ministry of Science and Technology, based on the original IMT-Advanced Promotion Group. In China, it is the primary platform through which 5G research and international exchange and cooperation is conducted.

Operators participating in the IMT-2020 Promotion Group include: China Mobile, China Telecom, China Unicom and Japanese telecoms operator NTT DoCoMo. Vendors which are part of the initiative are Huawei, ZTE, Ericsson, Nokia, Datang and Samsung. A number of chipset and test measurement vendors, including Qualcomm, Intel, Mediatek, Ctec, Keysight Technologies and Rohde & Schwartz are also part of the initiative.

The IMT-2020 Promotion Group completed the initial phase of its trial program in 2016. That phase included testing wireless technologies including massive multiple-input-multiple-output, novel multiple access, new waveforms, advance coding, ultra-dense network implementations and high-frequency communications. The trial phase also included network slicing, edge computing and network function reconstruction. The second phase of the national 5G tests were fully completed during last year.

Earlier this year, the Chinese government had authorized carriers to test 5G technology in major cities across the country. Under this initiative, state-run telcos are the process of deploying 5G networks in 16 cities to trial the technology.

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Intel and Ericsson meanwhile completed the first end-to-end nonstandalone 5G data call in July during a trial at Ericsson’s lab in Sweden.

References:

Huawei, Intel complete SA first call in China’s third-phase 5G R&D test