These bands will be used in official 3GPP standards, which contrast from the trailblazing (or impatient) specifications that companies have published for trials. This year, Verizon published 5G specs, while South Korean telecoms are already writing their own for the Winter Olympics in Seoul next year.
The major application for Non-Standalone 5G is fixed wireless access, which could replace expensive fiber optic cables. The intermediate 5G standard – which will be finished later this year and deployed next March – is targeting bands under 6 GHz, as well as the millimeter waves to be used in the new radio.
The 3.5 GHz band is one to keep an eye on, Kundargi said. For years, it has been reserved in the U.S. for military applications. But telecom regulators voted last year to open it for spectrum sharing experiments, in which the public could access the frequency band as long as the Department of Defense is offline.
Other bands under consideration for the first phase of Release 15 – the 3GPP’s name for the official 5G standard – include 52 GHz and 70 GHz, which Nokia targeted as long ago as 2012. AT&T has also been testing the 28 GHz band with a unique channel sounder that rolls through cities to better understand how millimeter waves interact with trees, walls, and people.
"The 3GPP will study how these bands work together [with lower bands] because depending on how you put them together you might have harmonics," said Kundargi. "Non-standalone 5G will pair an LTE and a new radio band. The anchor, for instance, will be the 3 GHz band while your data connectivity resides in the 28 GHz band."
