Verizon completes 5G radio specifications for its technology trials

• First US carrier to complete 5G radio specifications
• Continuing specification collaboration with its global operator partners
• US pre-commercial trials continue

US telco Verizon says it has completed its 5G radio specification and is the first US carrier to do so. The specification was conducted within Verizon’s 5G Technology Forum (V5GTF), the group formed late last year in cooperation with Cisco, Ericsson, Intel, LG, Nokia, Qualcomm and Samsung. The V5GTF is creating a common and extendable platform for Verizon’s 28 and 39GHz fixed wireless access trials and deployments.

The specification provides guidelines to test and validate key 5G technical components, as well as enabling industry partners such as chipset vendors, network vendors and other mobile operators to develop interoperable solutions and contribute to pre-standard testing and fabrication. The publically available document describes a general description of the physical layer of Verizon’s 5G radio access air interface. The ongoing tests will then use these specifications to help define relevant characteristics of the physical layer and specify attributes.

“The completion of the 5G radio specification is a key milestone toward the development of a complete 5G specification,” said Adam Koeppe, VP Network Technology Planning at Verizon, who is leading the telco’s 5G trial work. “The level of collaboration that we are seeing exceeds what we saw during 4G. This agile way of developing the specification and working with the ecosystem will enable us to get to market rapidly.”

Verizon has already started pre-commercial 5G testing in multiple locations in New Jersey, Massachusetts, and Texas. Earlier this year, Verizon announced progress on field tests, examining the characteristics of 5G technology in real-world environments.

Verizon says its goal in pre-commercial trials is to accelerate the pace of innovation and to bring forward the date when the industry can deliver 5G or 5G-like benefits. It says it has already validated numerous 5G technology enablers, such as wide bandwidth operation of several hundred MHz in size, multiple antenna array processing, and carrier aggregation capabilities. Tests of the all-important higher frequency millimetre wave systems have included throughput analysis with customer premises equipment at various locations inside buildings to facilitate the study of line-of-sight and non-line-of-sight performance, and propagation modelling.

In addition to Verizon’s work in the V5GTF, it continues to contribute to the secretive 5G Trial Specification Alliance, alongside partners SK Telecom, KT and Docomo, and is working directly KT on a harmonised 5G specification to be used for trials at the 2018 PyeongChang Olympics in Korea.