5.5G industry accelerates again! Qualcomm 5G Advanced-ready chip commercial terminals will be launched in the second half of the year

MWC 2023 is about to be held, and the 5G Advanced industry has added another big news! On February 15, Qualcomm announced the launch of the world's first 5G Advanced-ready baseband chip - Snapdragon® X75 5G modem and RF system, which supports millimeter wave and Sub-6GHz frequency bands, bringing all-round improvements in network coverage, latency, energy efficiency and mobility, and setting a new benchmark for smartphone connectivity.

As we all know, 5G Advanced is the next stage of 5G technology evolution. Its most notable feature is that it can bring ten times the current network capacity, such as increasing the download rate of mobile users from Gbps to 10Gbps to support ultra-wideband real-time interactive applications such as XR Pro and Metaverse. In addition, 5G Advanced also has features such as supporting uplink gigabit and hundreds of billions of IoT, fully meeting the needs of various industries for leapfrogging experience and deepening digital transformation.

Industry insiders know that the development of the network starts with the terminal. The release of 5G Advanced-ready chips means that the development of the 5G Advanced terminal industry will be accelerated, thereby accelerating the scale development of 5G Advanced networks. Especially considering that Qualcomm announced that "Snapdragon X75 is currently sampling, and commercial terminals are expected to be released in the second half of 2023", and the industry previously expected that 5G Advanced networks would be commercially available as early as 2024.

It is also worth noting that the 5G Advanced-ready chip released by Qualcomm this time not only supports a faster mobile phone connection experience, but also provides services for vertical industries (automobiles, PCs and industrial Internet of Things) and FWA (fixed wireless access) scenarios. This means that terminal manufacturers in the personal, industrial and home markets will benefit from it, helping to accelerate the development of the entire 5G Advanced industry ecosystem.

Continuous evolution, 5G Advanced technology standards achieve breakthroughs

The wireless industry has developed in an orderly and vibrant manner over the past 30 years. The key reason behind this is vision-driven and continuous iteration. From 1G to 5G, the wireless industry has basically followed the development law of one generation every ten years, and has continued to evolve in each major generation. 5G Advanced is the product of the continuous evolution of 5G under this law.

In 2020, the 5.5G industry vision of 5G evolution was first proposed by the industry. In April 2021, 3GPP officially named 5G evolution as 5G-Advanced, started the standardization process, and planned to define 5G-Advanced technical specifications through three versions: R18, R19, and R20. At the end of 2021, the first batch of 28 R18 projects were approved, and 5.5G technology research and standardization entered the substantive stage. The future R19 and R20 versions will further explore new 5.5G services and architectures.

With the common vision of the industry, 5G-Advanced has basically formed key capabilities and features such as 10Gbps downlink, 1Gbps uplink, millisecond-level latency, 100 billion connections, and integrated communication perception for 2025, bringing ten times the current network capacity and greatly improving the user experience in various scenarios. Over the past two years, the industry has done a lot of work in 5G Advanced technology innovation and has made key breakthroughs in multiple technical standards.

Among them, industry pioneers have made significant progress in the most representative downlink 10Gbps target network feature of 5G Advanced.

At the end of December 2022, China Mobile and its industry partners released the 5G-Advanced Dual-Chain Fusion Yearbook, showcasing the industry's first batch of 5G-Advanced end-to-end industry models jointly built by multiple parties. In terms of XR services, China Mobile, together with Huawei and Migu, completed the industry's first "X-Layer cross-layer integration" technology, end-network, cloud-industry four-in-one industry trial. The test results show that a single sector with 100M bandwidth based on China Mobile's 4.9GHz frequency band can support 20 XR terminal systems at the same time, with a capacity increase of 5 times, which can deeply enable XR and future Metaverse services with rates of up to 10Gbps and millisecond-level low latency requirements.

In addition, industry pioneers have also actively explored and achieved fruitful results in 5G Advanced target network features such as uplink 1Gbps, hundreds of billions of connections, and integrated communication.

In May 2022, China Telecom and Huawei took the lead in demonstrating the laboratory test verification results of the "Super Frequency Folding" 5G-Advanced innovative technology. The technology is based on the uplink equivalent bandwidth of 100MHz tested in the 3.5GHz frequency band, and can achieve an uplink peak rate of more than 1Gbps. At the same time, it shortens the end-to-end delay from 10ms to less than 4ms, fully meeting the stringent requirements of core production links such as remote control and machine collaboration for large network bandwidth, low latency, and reliability.

Also in May 2022, China Unicom held a press conference on technological innovation and practice results, jointly released 5G evolution innovation results with industry partners and officially launched a technology innovation industry cooperation plan. In the field of intelligent super perception, China Unicom has achieved a 1km perception distance and sub-meter perception accuracy based on base stations in the direction of communication perception integration, and achieved an air interface delay line of 4ms in the URLLC direction, with a delay stability of 99.999%.

At the same time, under the guidance of the IMT-2020 (5G) Promotion Group, equipment vendors represented by Huawei have actively participated in the testing and verification of 5G enhanced technologies, and have completed tests and verifications such as high-precision timing, 5G LAN, 5G telesensory integration, 5G medium- and high-speed Internet of Things (RedCap), millimeter wave FR-only networking, and low-latency and high-reliability (URLLC), continuously enriching the capabilities of 5G enhanced technologies.

Terminals are ready to help accelerate the development of the 5G Advanced industry

From the development experience of 3G, 4G and 5G, in the era of mobile Internet where experience is king, the leading position of operators' networks is inseparable from the rapid development of network construction and the advance planning of terminal layout. The current industry unanimously believes that after nearly three years of advancement, 5G-Advanced has entered a new stage of development. It is time to make good product preparations and jointly mature the end-to-end chip industry chain.

In order to match the 5G Advanced target network characteristics represented by the downlink 10Gbps, the industry generally believes that 5G-Advanced chips and smart terminals need to move towards 3T8R or even more channels, and support carrier aggregation of more than 4 carriers to create 10G experience terminals, in order to fully unleash 10G capabilities and meet the needs of future businesses such as XR and Metaverse.

Qualcomm's 5G Advanced-ready baseband chips have already been demonstrated in these aspects. For example, its products for mobile scenarios use ten-carrier aggregation in the millimeter wave band, and support five-carrier aggregation for downlink and FDD uplink MIMO in the Sub-6GHz band, which can achieve excellent spectrum aggregation and capacity performance; products for FWA scenarios not only support millimeter wave and Sub-6GHz, but also support Wi-Fi 7 and 10Gb Ethernet capabilities, which can achieve network peak rates.

Referring to the development history of 5G, we can find that global operators, including China's three major operators, have adopted a terminal-first strategy, including but not limited to stimulating the rapid development of the terminal industry from aspects such as technical standards, product development, and ecological construction, so that advanced networks and diverse terminals can resonate at the same frequency. Needless to say, the more advanced 5G Advanced network also needs to take corresponding measures to promote the readiness of 5G baseband chips to enable mobile phones, cars, AR/VR, CPE and other smart terminals.

According to ABI Research, the migration to 5G-Advanced will reshape the mobile and wearable device market, with 4.9 million 5G-Advanced compatible mobile devices expected to ship in 2024, increasing to 242.9 million in 2026 and 481.9 million in 2027. The rapid increase in the number of 5G-Advanced terminal devices will surely help the scale development of 5G Advanced networks and create a prosperous 5G Advanced industry ecosystem.

On the network equipment side that corresponds to user terminals, as the industry collaborates to make great progress in 5G Advanced standards, spectrum, and technology, we can see continuous innovation and breakthroughs in technical fields such as ultra-large bandwidth, ELAA-MM, uplink and downlink decoupling, multi-frequency fusion, RedCap, NB-IoT, and Passive IoT. These technologies have gradually gathered the comprehensive capabilities required to build 5G Advanced networks, helping operators match network and terminal capabilities, leading the development of the 5G Advanced industry, and maximizing the capabilities of advanced networks.

It is reported that 5G Advanced will also be one of the key topics at the upcoming MWC 2023 in Barcelona, ​​and many industry giants will share the latest progress of 5G Advanced on stage. We believe that as long as global industry chain partners continue to innovate around 5G Advanced standards, spectrum, products, ecology, applications and other aspects, and build an industry ecology with an open, cooperative and win-win mentality, we will soon see the arrival of a more advanced 5.5G!