Gold Coast welcomes 3GPP as 5G comes closer

Four times per year, the 3GPP meets for a week-long plenary meeting to review the enormous body of work produced by its working groups, take key decisions and set the course for future developments. The next 3GPP plenary is being hosted by Telstra on the Gold Coast, from 10 to 14 September.

The critical communications community joined 3GPP back in the early 2010s in order to ensure the complementarity of (and, perhaps one day, the replacement of) existing digital LMR/PMR solutions such as TETRA and P25 with high-speed LTE capabilities. A number of government bodies regularly attend 3GPP plenaries and working groups, as do many member vendors and market representation partners such as TCCA and PSC Europe.

The focus for the past 18 months or so has been Release 15, also known in the community as 5G Phase 1. Although LTE/4G infrastructure, services and devices are still being rolled out across the world — a process that will continue for many years to come — the focus and emphasis of 3GPP standardisation work is now on fifth-generation communications, where networks will converge and be opened up to exciting new capabilities and use cases.

At the September plenary, Release 15 will be cleaned up and Release 16 will move forward. Release 15 has been a fairly complex undertaking as mobile operators around the world are at different stages in their deployment of LTE. A few more-developed markets such as the USA, Korea and Japan had been pushing for an early drop — so-called 5G NSA (Non Stand-Alone) — to be approved by 3GPP by end-2017, with all other Release 15 features, including 5G SA (Stand-Alone) completed in June 2018.

Demonstrating the importance of public safety within 3GPP, a separate working group, SA6, was convened in early 2015 to develop a mission-critical PTT (MCPTT) solution during Release 13, following the standardisation of some basic enablers for group calls (GCSE) and device-to-device (ProSe) during Release 12. SA6’s work has continued through Release 14 to include common MC services, enhancements to MCPTT and separate MCVideo and MCData packages. As well as dropping the LTE moniker during Release 15 to enable MC services to run over 5G or other 3GPP/non-3GPP bearers at some point in the future, work is already well underway to standardise interworking and interconnect solutions to other 3GPP and legacy (eg, TETRA, P25) networks. ETSI has also organised MCPTT/MCX plugtests over the past 12 months or so to enable as many as 30 suppliers of different MC network and service components to test their solutions.

The Gold Coast plenary meeting comes at an important time for the wider converging fixed-wireless, mobile and critical communications communities as we await products and services based on earlier 3GPP releases and move closer to a future 5G world. Global standards and global cooperation embodied in 3GPP remain vital as we move into this new world of smart and safe cities, connected and autonomous vehicles, automation, virtualisation and digitalisation of almost everything.

As we convene in September, we must continue focusing on the final prize for humanity of radically different, more advanced societies and economies based on new governance, social and economic models that promise a better, smarter, safer world.

Peter Clemons is founder and managing director of Quixoticity, a critical communications consultancy, and a frequent visitor to Australasia where he regularly speaks at top-level conferences such as Comms Connect.

Image credit: ©iStockphoto.com/Oleksiy Mark

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