5G-Advanced Evolution Advances, ABI Says
The 5G technology space is beginning its 5G-Advanced technical evolution, which will see an increased focus on extended reality, artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and increased sustainability efforts hitting the market starting in 2024, according to a recent ABI Research report.
The 5G technology space is beginning its 5G-Advanced technical evolution, which will see an increased focus on extended reality, artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and increased sustainability efforts hitting the market starting in 2024, according to a recent ABI Research report.
The firm cited standards body 3GPP recently approving its Release-18 package at the end of last year, which marked the official start of work on 5G-Advanced. That specification package has a preliminary freeze date of December 2023, at which point vendors should be able to start pushing those approved updates into commercial equipment.
ABI Research predicts 5G-Advanced radios will start gaining traction in the market between 2024 and 2026. The firm expects the consumer infrastructure market will lead the space, with 75% of 5G base stations serving the market being upgraded to the 5G-Advanced specification by 2030. The enterprise infrastructure market will lag, hitting about half of that upgrade ratio.
The market witnessed a similar model with 4G standards. Initial deployments began in 2010, with 4G-Advanced updates hitting the market around the middle of the last decade.
Network operators and vendors will back this 5G-Advanced evolution as they look to squeeze a greater financial return on their deployment investments. Some operators have already admitted that it could take up to a decade before they profit from their 5G investments.
“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. 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,” Gu Zhang, 5G and mobile network infrastructure principal analyst at ABI Research, wrote in the report. “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. 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.”
Zhang noted that vendor competition has already started, with established players like Ericsson, Huawei, Nokia, ZTE, and Qualcomm all having trialed their offerings with operators.
“Ongoing development in this area will continue to bring improvements on traffic throughputs, network coverage, power saving, anomaly detection, etc.,” Zhang added.
