Vodafone has announced today that its UK 5G network will go live in July. The network will cover customers in seven cities across the UK and will be switched-on on 3rd July.
The cities to be covered will be London, Birmingham, Bristol, Cardiff, Glasgow, Liverpool and Manchester. Twelve more towns and cities will be covered by the end of the year.
These will be Birkenhead, Blackpool, Bournemouth, Guildford, Newbury, Portsmouth, Plymouth, Reading, Southampton, and Stoke-on-Trent.
Furthermore, in addition to becoming the first UK network to offer 5G services, Vodafone claims that it will also offer 5G roaming, covering the UK, Germany, Italy and Spain.
“It means that UK businesses can lead the world in adopting 5G to boost productivity and attract investment. It means consumers can get the fastest mobile speeds ever, and it means that our public sector will be able to adopt new services to improve healthcare, social services and housing,” said Vodafone UK CEO Nick Jeffery.
Four 5G smartphones will be available from Vodafone – two from Huawei, the Samsung Galaxy S10 5G and the Xiaomi Mi Mix 3 5G.
All that was missing from Vodafone’s announcement was… pricing. The company says that it will divulge contracts and prices next week.
1/5/19 – The Brighton Dome events space is to use the city’s 5G testbed network in select areas of the building, it has said, making the Dome one of the UK’s first large-scale performance venues to use the technology.
“Not only will [5G] offer artists the chance to create exciting new work, but our audiences and visitors to Brighton will be able to enjoy and experience arts events in a completely different way. We’re excited by the endless possibilities this could bring to the future of creativity,” said Andrew Comben, CEO at Brighton Dome & Brighton Festival.
23/4/19 – Theresa May has agreed to allow Huawei to build ‘non-core’ parts of the UK’s 5G infrastructure, says The Telegraph. The move has surprised and angered both government officials and industry stakeholders, who have issued warnings about the company’s ties to the Chinese government.
In July last year, the government warned about risks posed to UK infrastructure from using Huawei hardware, followed by a report in August about out-of-date software. At the end of the year, BT said that it would only use Huawei hardware at the edge of its network, going forward, and would bar the company from bidding for core 5G contracts.
17/4/19 – Ericsson claims to have switched on Europe’s first ‘large-scale’ commercial 5G network.
Launched in partnership with Swisscom, the network is now available in more than 50 cities and communities across Switzerland.
Swisscom and Ericsson plan to extend coverage to 90 per cent of the Swiss population by the end of 2019.
Individuals with 5G devices are able to begin using the network immediately.
Arun Bansal, president and head of Europe and Latin America at Ericsson, called the switching on of the network “a momentous occassion.”
4/4/19 – Samsung has started mass production of 5G modems and chipsets. The multi-mode chipsets will support the 5G New Radio (5G-NR) sub-6GHz spectrum, as well as legacy radio access technologies, such as 3G and 4G mobile communications.
Products will include the Exynos Modem 5100, which Samsung has already shown off, as well as a number of other chipsets.
“Our multi-mode solutions, the Exynos Modem 5100, Exynos RF 5500 and Exynos SM 5800 will together enable powerful yet energy-efficient 5G performance along with the network versatility that allows users to stay connected wherever they are,” said Inyup Kang, president of System LSI Business at Samsung Electronics.
The aforementioned Exynos 5100 completed its preparations for commercialisation in August 2018 with a successful real-world 5G-NR data call test. Samsung claims that the modem supports virtually all networks from 5G’s sub-6GHz and mmWave spectrums to 2G GSM/CDMA, 3G WCDMA, TD-SCDMA, HSPA and 4G LTE networks in a single chip. The modem is paired with RF and supply modulator solutions, Exynos RF 5500 and Exynos SM 5800 respectively, it adds.
Samsung’s Exynos RF 5500 supports legacy networks and 5G-NR sub-6GHz networks in a single chip. RF transceivers are key components enabling smartphones to transmit and receive data over mobile networks.
When transmitting voice or data from smartphone to carrier, the RF ‘up-converts’ the modem’s baseband signal to high GHz-range cellular frequencies so that the data can be sent over the connected network. It also ‘down converts’ signals that the device receives from the mobile network.
The Exynos RF 5500 has 14 receiver paths for download, and supports 4×4 MIMO (Multiple-Input, Multiple-Output) and higher-order 256 Quadrature Amplitude Modulation (QAM) schemes to maximise the data transfer rate over the 5G network.
The Exynos SM 5800 is a low-power supply modulator solution for 2G to 5G-NR sub-6GHz that supports up to 100MHz envelope-tracking (ET) bandwidths.
1/3/19 – According to research by Trusted Reviews, only about 19 per cent of consumers are ‘fully aware’ of the benefits of 5G, with 44 per cent confused by the technology. Questions about its cost (50 per cent), benefits (44 per cent), speed (39 per cent) and availability (35 per cent) are widespread, but few – just seven per cent – asked about the need for new hardware to support 5G.
25/2/19 – MWC 2019 is the site of multiple 5G announcements, which are summarised below:
HTC announced a 5G Hub: a mobile smart hub that will – apparently – give connected devices the speed of a 5G connection. The company shared few details on how it works, but did give some specs on the device. It has a 5″ touchscreen, a Qualcomm Snapdragon 855 chip and X50 5G modem, and will be launched worldwide later this year.
On the subject of Qualcomm, the 855 chip is the company’s new 5G SoC that is in nearly every 5G device announced at MWC. Said to be two times faster than its nearest competitor, it also consumes a lot of power, and so Qualcomm has introduced a new technology it calls PowerSave, which will essentially lower power consumption so that battery life on 5G phones is similar to existing 4G devices.
LG UPlus unveiled its smart factory system using 5G, in cooperation with LG Electronics and LG CNS, which leverages 5G to control smart functions. At MWC the company showed a direct connection from Barcelona to a factory in Pyeongtaek, demonstrating various systems around the facility.
22/2/19 – The BBC is today trialling live radio broadcasts over 5G in Stronsay, Orkney, to test the system for reaching rural areas. It is part of the 5G RuralFirst initiative, which aims to show the benefits of 5G for non-urban areas.
Participants in Orkney will need the BBC Sounds app and a broadcast-ready smartphone. The broadcast (one source, many receivers) aspect differentiates this trial from live streaming radio, which is multicast (the source is sent individually to each streaming device). Such a system is difficult to use in rural areas, where bandwidth is limited and networks can become congested.
24/1/19 – Communications giant Huawei has unveiled what it claims is the world’s first core chip designed for 5G base stations.
Called Tiangang, the chip will support both ‘simplified’ 5G networks and large-scale deployments. Huawei currently claims around 30 commercial 5G contracts around the world and has shipped more than 25,000 5G base stations.
The company claims that the chip is two-and-a-half times more powerful than prior generation chips, and that a single chip can control up to 64 channels. In addition, it supports the 200MHz high-spectral bandwidth.
It can also support large-scale integration of active power amplifiers, and passive antenna arrays into much smaller antennas. This should enable mobile operators to use active antenna units that are half the size, 23 per cent lighter and consuming 21 per cent less power compared to current-generation units.
In the process, claims Huawei, they should be able to pack more into their base station sites and cut deployment costs – 5G base stations should be deployable in half the time mobile operators took to deploy their 4G base stations.
The release, ahead of the Mobile World Congress 2019 (MWC19) trade show in Barcelona at the end of February, comes as Huawei faces increased pressure over its links to China’s government. Led by the US, an increasing number of governments around the world have issued edicts shutting Huawei out of their forthcoming 5G network infrastructures on national security grounds.
Australia and New Zealand have already written or re-written regulations that effectively shut-out Huawei and ZTE from 5G network deployments on security grounds. Countries across Europe are also actively considering bans, while BT has already excluded Huawei hardware from its 5G core, citing security issues.
And, this week, MPs on the Science and Technology Select Committee wrote to three secretaries of state, as well as Huawei, to demand assurances over the security of Huawei 5G communications technology.
The chair of the Committee, Norman Lamb MP, pointed out in his letter to the Secretary of State for Defence, Gavin Williamson, that the Huawei Cyber Security Evaluation Centre (HCSEC) has already warned that it can provide only “limited assurance that all risks to UK national security from Huawei’s involvement in the UK’s critical networks have been sufficiently mitigated”.
In a series of questions, Lamb also demanded to know more about how the government manages potential security risks posed by foreign suppliers of telecoms infrastructure in the UK, whether the HCSEC model will be extended to other suppliers, and what assessment the government had made on the Chinese government’s ability to compel Chinese companies to assist in national intelligence work.
Huawei’s main rival in China, ZTE, has already faced an adverse assessment from the UK’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) over “the national security risks arising from the use of ZTE equipment or services” within the UK’s telecoms infrastructure that, it claims, “cannot be mitigated”.
22/1/19 – In an effort to lower the time and money spent on triage practices at A&E wards, IoT and connectivity provider Pangea is working on a remote triage project with Kingston University. The partners are developing video compression and data transfer techniques over 4G+ and 5G connections, with funding from Innovate UK. If successful, medics would be able to view live video streams from ambulance teams.