The third phase of 5G R&D program focuses on pre-commercial product development
China has started the third phase of 5G technology research and development tests, ahead of schedule, as the Asian nation accelerates the process to commercialize next-generation telecom services. China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology said the third phase of technical tests aims to get pre-commercial products ready for when the first version of 5G standard comes out in June next year.
Chinese authorities have also called on vendors and other ecosystem stakeholders to boost efforts to upgrade testing environments and a push experiments related to user applications.
China recently completed the second phase of 5G tests and initially expected to start the third phase during 2018. China established the IMT-2020 development group in 2013 in a move to foster the development of 5G technologies.
The IMT-2020 Promotion Group completed the initial phase of its trial program in 2016. That phase included testing wireless technologies includingmassive 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.
Five companies including Huawei and ZTE have built 15 base stations in Huairou District in Beijing to support further testing.
China had previously announced plans to commercialize 5G mobile networks as early as 2020. China Mobile, the world’s largest mobile operator, previously said it aims to deploy 10,000 5G base stations across China in 2020.
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
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