ABI Research predicts that 75 percent of 5G networks will be upgraded to 5G-Advanced by 2030.
Global mobile network standards collaboration project 3GPP approved Release-18, the first release of the 5G-Advanced standard, in December 2021. The stage two functional freeze is planned for March 2023 before a stage three freeze in December 2023.
(Credit: 3GPP)
5G-Advanced is the next major evolution of 5G. Networks that upgrade to 5G-Advanced will benefit from enhanced mobility and reliability for advanced applications.
“In 5G-Advanced, Extended Reality (XR) applications will promise monetary opportunities to both the consumer markets with use cases like gaming, video streaming, as well as enterprise opportunities such as remote working and virtual training,” explains Gu Zhang, 5G & Mobile Network Infrastructure Principal Analyst at ABI Research.
“Therefore, XR applications are a major focus of 3GPP working groups to significantly improve XR-specific traffic performance and power consumption for the mass market adoption.”
Courtesy of Nokia, here are some of the key enhancements in 5G-Advanced:
“Another noticeable feature is AI/ML which will become essential for future networks given the predictive rapid growth in 5G network usage and use case complexities which can’t be managed by legacy optimization approaches with presumed models,” added Zhang.
“System-level network energy saving is also a critical aspect as operators need to reduce the deployment cost but assure network performance for various use cases.”
ABI Research expects 5G-Advanced adoption to be much faster in consumer markets. In the enterprise market, the company’s analysts predict the ratio of 5G networks upgraded to 5G-Advanced to be around half the consumer market.
The findings in this article are from ABI Research’s 5G-Advanced and the Road to 6G report (paywall)
(Photo by Jeremy Bezanger on Unsplash)
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