The Private Network Opportunity

BRINGING 5G NR INTO UNLICENSED SPECTRUM: The private network opportunity By Sean Kinney DECEMBER 2020 Report sponsors: FEATURE REPORT Introduction trum typically associated with Wi- of things deployments. Grand View Cellular connectivity is vital to Fi as a way to augment the capacity calls out robotics, camera systems consumers and enterprises. LTE provided by licensed frequencies. and industrial sensors as key appli- facilitated the transition of cellu- Licensed Assisted Access (LAA) cations and name checks industrial lar for talk and text to cellular as proved a boon for operators looking giants ABB, Siemens and Mercedes the connectivity medium for mo- to max out the capabilities of LTE Benz as early movers in the space. bile broadband which, in turn, fun- networks by aggregating licensed But beyond these large incum- damentally changed the way we spectrum with the unlicensed 5 bent players, there’s demand in interact with connected devices. GHz band. Similarly, MulteFire the small- and medium-sized enter- Although 5G has for some time tak- sparked significant interest in put- prise space as well which, for rele- en the lion’s share of hype in the ting cellular technologies to work vant network and solution vendors, telecoms sector--and rightfully so in the 5 GHz band in a standalone arguably presents a bigger, long- given that it will build on LTE while mode of operation in support of pri- term source of revenue. There are augmenting capabilities to support vate networking and similar types numerous deployment and imple- significantly higher throughput, of use cases for high-value indus- mentation models in play here but, markedly lower latency, the inter- trial sectors. Now, as 5G is evolving again, any cellular project relies on net of things at massive scale, and and scaling, bringing the latest gen- spectrum access and, given famil- all around power enterprise digital eration of cellular into unlicensed iarity with Wi-Fi systems using un- transformation--LTE is the work- spectrum represents a major oppor- licensed spectrum, there’s a strong horse of cellular for the time being. tunity for both operators and enter- case for its cellular analogs, both But whether focused on LTE or 5G, prises as they work independently LTE and 5G, to help support these the consummate bottleneck in net- and together on furthering digi- types of critical communications work capacity is the availability of tal transformation and making the use cases. In dissecting the market spectrum. While regulators around Industry 4.0 vision a reality. for private 5G, Grand View focus- the world are coordinating with the In its analysis, Grand View es on manufacturing, energy and telecoms industry on reallocating Research estimates the global val- utilities, transportation and logis- existing licensed spectrum, open- ue of 5G private networks at $919 tics, aerospace and defense, oil and ing up new frequencies for mobile million in 2020 and projects a com- gas, mining and the public sector. services, and liberalizing access to pound annual growth rate of near- As it relates to the outlook for unli- include operators and enterprise ly 40% between now and 2027. The censed spectrum to serve the needs interests, spectrum availability re- growth driver here is primarily the of these verticals, Grand View reck- mains a gating factor. need from the industrial sector for ons that “growth is attributed to Beginning with LTE, the telecoms network reliability, lower latency, the rising demand for high speed sector looked to unlicensed spec- and support for industrial internet private 5G networks at affordable 2 FEATURE REPORT costs. Also, unlicensed spectrum other companies. They were specif- utilization plus higher capacity.” bandwidth is easily accessible and ically working to apply LTE-U to At the onset of LTE-U, one of the highly preferred [for] massive ma- 3GPP Releases 10, 11 and 12. key things that had to be worked chine-type communications.” Qualcomm’s Xiaoxia Zhang has out was co-existence with Wi-Fi op- been working on cellular in un- erations. One of the primary issues A brief history of cellular technolo- licensed for more than a decade. here as it relates to LTE-U/Wi-Fi co- gies in unlicensed spectrum Reflecting on 3G, she noted that typ- existence is around requirements LTE-U ical phone usage was simply plac- for listen-before-talk. To give an ex- Extending cellular into unli- ing voice calls but that changed sig- ample, Europe and Japan require censed frequencies began crystal- nificantly with the advent of LTE. devices in unlicensed spectrum lizing in the 2013-2014 timeframe “At a certain point we realized that to implement listen-before-talk with LTE-Unlicensed. This is a tech- in order to increase wireless capac- whereas other places like the U.S. nology that was effectively invent- ity, we have two technical areas for and Korea don’t require that. In ed by Qualcomm engineers and was us to work on. One is how to engage terms of promoting fair co-exis- designed for operation in the 5 GHz more spectrum.” The other techni- tence in the band, LTE-U used a band. Much of this early work was cal area is large scale network den- MAC layer mechanism based on a done in the LTE-U Forum which sification. “By combining those two time division multiplexing to im- was established by Qualcomm, technologies,” Zhang said, “that mo- plement a duty cycle approach. Not Ericsson, Verizon, T-Mobile, tivates us to use unlicensed spec- to undermine what was done with Samsung, Alcatel-Lucent and a few trum...to achieve better spectrum LTE-U but the real impact came as LTE-U was technologically evolved to LAA, Licensed Assisted Access. LAA LAA allows an operator to aggregate an anchor channel of licensed spectrum with multiple channels of unlicensed 5 GHz spectrum. From the standards side, this began in Release 13 and morphed into enhanced LAA (eLAA) with Release 14 and further enhanced LAA (feLAA) in Release 15. That evolution grew from just downlink to include downlink and Image courtesy of Qualcomm uplink, then autonomous uplink. 3 A New Way to Private Wireless MulteFire® and 5G New Radio Unlicensed are innovative technologies enabling new IoT deployment scenarios that are locally controlled, optimized and readily deployed. MulteFire and 5G NR-U deliver key performance advantages over alternative solutions in unlicensed spectrum, such as coverage, capacity, security and mobility. Our latest white paper from ABI Research provides in-depth analysis on the benefits of 5G networks in unlicensed, shared and locally licensed spectrum for enterprise connectivity. Download The Importance of Spectrum Liberalization for Private 5G Networks white paper today! The MulteFire Alliance (MFA) supports the common interests of members, developers and users in the application of LTE and next generation mobile cellular technology—such as 5G New Radio—in conﬁgurations that use only unlicensed or shared radio spectrum. Learn more at ww.MulteFire.org. FEATURE REPORT to more market activations around the country. AT&T also used those gigabit LTE technologies, including LAA, which to some degree set the stage for their 5G Evolution brand- ing. T-Mobile arguably was the most bullish on LAA--which was used in thousands of small cell deployments in 2017 and 2018. MulteFire LAA was decidedly good for op- Image courtesy of Ericsson erators and benefited immense- Specific to LAA, the major ad- idea was that early commercial 5G ly from collaborative standardiza- vancement as adopted by carriers deployments would be geographi- tion done under the auspices of was the ability to aggregate LTE cally limited so you wanted to have 3GPP and, given the broad mem- operations in licensed bands with a high quality LTE surround so that bership of that group, was relative- unlicensed spectrum in 5 GHz. If users wouldn’t have this jarring ex- ly quickly translated from stan- you think back to the 2017, 2018 perience as they moved out of 5G dards to equipment and then onto timeframe, right before the 5G coverage and into LTE coverage. commercial deployment. 3GPP hype cycle really kicked into high The mix of technologies encom- however did not set to work on a gear, the industry was talking passed by gigabit LTE are LAA, 4X4 standalone mode of cellular opera- about gigabit LTE. Gigabit LTE, as MIMO, 256 QAM and multi-channel tion in unlicensed spectrum which the name implies, was all about carrier aggregation. set the stage for the MulteFire using a combination of technolo- To give a point in time snapshot Alliance to fill that gap.. To put a gies to drive peak throughput of of how carriers were thinking fine point on the distinction, LAA LTE up to and past that 1 Gbps about this mix of technologies, in requires an anchor channel in li- downlink mark. August 2017 Verizon commercially censed spectrum which maps to its The logic here was two-fold: there deployed Ericsson LAA radios and applicability to and adoption by wasn’t then and isn’t now an ex- reported downlink throughput of operators with licensed spectrum pectation that 5G is going to rapid- 953 Mbps via aggregation of three holdings. MulteFire is designed for ly replace 4G, so there was a focus channels of 5 GHz with a 20 mega- standalone operation meaning cel- on continuing to enhance that LTE hertz channel of AWS spectrum. lular transmissions can occur sole- experience. As it relates to 5G, the That initial deployment gave way ly in unlicensed spectrum. This 5 FEATURE REPORT Image courtesy of MulteFire Alliance Image courtesy of MulteFire means MulteFire can be used by at industrial use cases, when you es the following working groups: neutral hosts, Wi-Fi providers and, look at industries [and] what they technical specification, radio, end- perhaps most notably, by private need to secure quality of service, to-end architecture, certification, enterprise users.

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