Why There Is An Urgency to Usher In 5G-A Network

I want to talk to you about 5G-A, which is 5G-Advanced. In other words, 5.5G. In recent times, you should find that there are more and more topics surrounding 5G-A, and attention continues to rise. By the time you are through reading this article, you will know why there is an urgency to usher in 5G-A network come 2024.

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There is an Urgency to usher in 5G-A Network. Here Is Why

The reason is simple. 2023 is ending, and we are about to enter 2024. A significant event in the communications industry in 2024 is that the 3GPP R18 version will be frozen.

Just as a reminder, in case you already know, 5G is divided into two stages: R15 to R17 is the first stage, and R18-R20 is the second stage. The second-stage technology has significant enhancements and improvements compared to the first stage, but it is not considered 6G, so it is called the 5.5G stage.

Will All welcome the Advent Of 5G-A?

In April 2021, 5.5G was officially named 5G-Advanced by 3GPP, and related standardization work was launched. According to the established plan, R18, which is about to be frozen, will be the first official version of 5G-A and the first appearance of 5G-A. That’s why the entire industry is so concerned.

So, 5G-A is about to debut. Will it be greeted with flowers and applause? Frankly, not entirely.

In vertical industries such as mining, electric power, and ports, 5G applications continue to emerge, helping many companies improve quality, reduce costs, and increase efficiency.

Despite this, there are still some doubts about the development of 5G in society. Many believe that the investment in 5G construction is huge, but there are no popular applications, and the return rate is already upon us. Some people even think 4G is wholly sufficient and 5G is unnecessary.

Some people even doubt the technical research significance and commercial value of 5G.

Why Is It Necessary To Develop 5G and Accelerate The Debut Of 5G-A?

After thinking, observing, and communicating, I gradually realized the necessity of developing 5G.

In the just concluded World 5G Conference in Zhengzhou, experts from the three major operators, including Wanhua Chemical Group, Haier, and Great Wall Seiko, gave a new understanding of 5G-A.

Why We Need to Develop 5G-A.

1. User Needs to Drive the Development

Demand has always been the main driving force for technological development. Without demand, there is no supply or application. No matter how advanced the technology is, no matter how high the indicators are, there is no way to succeed.

People often say that 5G has no popular applications and users have no demand for 5G.

This view is mainly because when people look at 5G, they think of consuming the Internet in the 3G/4G era.

Consumer Internet is the digitization of their lifestyle. The success of 4G is because of smartphones. After the speed of mobile phone networks increased, with the help of smartphones, people could chat, shop online, watch videos, play games, and enjoy the convenience and happiness of digital life.

5G serves both the consumer and industrial Internet. On the consumer Internet side, there is indeed no demand for popular products, so C-end users do not perceive the value of 5G. Coupled with the early irrational hype, the greater the expectations, the greater the disappointments.

The complexity of the industrial Internet far exceeds that of the consumer Internet. We often say that “there are thousands of industries and hundreds of industries,” and each has diverse work scenarios.

This cannot be solved by selling hardware and software or selling internet traffic like the consumer Internet.

Suppose an enterprise wants to go fully digital. In that case, it needs to do top-level design, change its organizational structure and business processes, and carry out scenario customization and technology selection.

This process is extremely long, and measuring it by consumer Internet standards is inappropriate.

So, Do Business Enterprises Have Demand For 5G and 5G-A?

The answer is yes.

In the past four years, vertical industries have carried out many 5G implementations and discovered some problems, including performance deficiencies and blind spots in scenarios, which drove the birth of 5G-A.

Since this year, some companies have carried out 5G-A pilots and provided preliminary evaluations.

Wanhua Chemical Group has launched over 1,000 5G equipment terminals, implementing various application scenarios such as remote monitoring of equipment, unmanned warehousing and logistics, personnel positioning, safety monitoring of production areas, and unmanned driving.

They now use wireless cameras based on RedCap, eliminating the work of digging trenches and laying cables required by traditional wired cameras (construction in chemical industry parks has strict requirements and complicated approval processes), without any loss in picture smoothness and clarity.

The total cost was reduced by more than 60%.

In their production areas and equipment areas, there are a large number of instruments and meters that require various data collection and real-time return transmission. They plan to combine RedCap with instrumentation to complete these tasks.

Compared with traditional 5G, RedCap has obvious lightweight advantages, lower power consumption, and cost.

In the future, as the industrial chain becomes more mature and shipments increase, prices will fall further.

Regarding power consumption, it has dropped to about 2W, which aligns with the index requirements for chemical product explosion-proof terminals.

In a city in China, the local health commission has built a unified data collection platform, and each hospital collects and reports information. Initially, they used Wi-Fi, but the network was too complicated, and the security did not meet the requirements. After switching to RedCap, the network was established smoothly, and the cost and security met the requirements.

In addition to RedCap, let’s look at another example of a 5G-A landing uRLLC scenario.

Great Wall Precision is a wholly-owned parts subsidiary of Great Wall Motors.

Based on the group’s digital needs, they launched a pilot verification of “5G-A+ Industrial Internet”. They joined forces with China Unicom, Huawei, and Boao to explore the factory’s core layer of production control, introduce 5G communications, and realize wireless replacement of wired ones.

It took them two years to build a 5G ultra-reliable, low-latency, and flexible door welding line in Seiko Automation.

Traditional production sites are controlled through buses. For the first time in the industry, they have replaced the current Profinet network cables with 5G.

After the transformation, they solved many nagging problems.

First, factory equipment is diverse and comes from different manufacturers. The agreements of other manufacturers are also different.

The factory network has a pyramid architecture, with independent wiring for data collection and industrial control. The diversification of bus standards makes it easy for information islands to appear.

Second, the on-site industrial network has many layers, many cables, and many faults. Especially in the mobile application aspects of production, such as the robotic arms in the workshop, including slides and turntables, which are equipment related to flexible production, long-term operation will cause bus wear and failure.

If a fault occurs, it will cause the line to stop and cause losses (hundreds of thousands to millions per minute).

Troubleshooting is also tricky because you don’t know whether the problem is with the device or the bus. If several lines in the bus are broken, data packet loss will occur, which is challenging to deal with.

Third, the construction period is long, and the cost is high.

Great Wall is a car company that updates its models very quickly. The production line will be reorganized or rebuilt every time it is updated. The wired network needs to be rewired at this time, the construction period is very long, and the equipment placement lacks flexibility.

5G uRLLC industrial control demonstration

Based on the above pain points, they decided to adopt 5G. According to their statistics, a single factory can reduce network failures by about 60 hours per year. Wireless replaces wired, the cycle time increases by 1 to 1.5 seconds, and the production value increases by approximately 800 million per year.

The introduction of new models can also be advanced in 10 to 15 days. 5G is used instead of Wi-Fi because 5G has native features in terms of network hard slicing and 5G LAN, which can better guarantee QoS and integrate with the factory’s digital system.

Let’s look at the needs and applications of 5G-A ultra-wideband

5G-A’s downlink reaches 10 Gbps (10Gbps) and uplink reaches Gigabit (1Gbps). This is also an indicator required in many industry scenarios.

Shaanxi Coal Zhiyin Technology specializes in applying 5G technology in coal mines. They joined forces with China Telecom and Huawei to launch a 5G-A mining base station in Shaanxi Coal, which achieved good results and won the annual benchmark demonstration case title at the 2023 China 5G+ Industrial Internet Conference by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology.

Their coal mine project uses three features of 5G-A in one go:

The first is Big Upside and RedCap. Now, the country is promoting smart mines, making mines unmanned, and reducing the number of people. This has led to a large increase in front-end sensing devices deployed in actual work scenarios. For underground 5G base stations, the number of devices that need to be connected to a single base station increases.
It is worth mentioning that a large amount of gas in coal mines is flammable and explosive. In the past, traditional base stations were installed underground by adding explosion-proof shells, which were bulky and complicated to install. The intrinsically safe mining base station they developed is small, meets regulatory requirements, and is very easy to install, helping 5G-A to be used in coal mine scenarios.

5G-A Synaesthesia Integration Feature.

There is a lot of dust underground in coal mines, making it difficult to identify objects through cameras. With the help of 5G-A synaesthetic integration, the road recognition rate reaches 95%, improving 5G underground safety.
5G synaesthesia integration is now a very popular research direction. It can be used for tracking, positioning, ranging and speed measurement, and image recognition.
Also, synaesthesia is very effective in managing low-altitude drones and can protect the low-altitude economy.
Finally, look at P-IoT (Passive IoT), the passive Internet of Things.

The functions of P-IoT are similar to RFID, but based on the 5G technology system, the coverage range is significantly increased. Traditional RFID can cover up to 20 meters. If it covers a large area, it will increase the cost and cause mutual interference.

The coverage capability of P-IoT far exceeds that of RFID, and it can interact with large networks to facilitate management and improve efficiency.

Haier has introduced P-IoT in its raw material logistics management. They built a digital base associated with tens of thousands of material types.

Based on P-IoT’s tag passive interconnection capabilities, it not only improved the capabilities from positions to warehousing and suppliers but also realized information flow, physical logistics, and The integration of three value streams into one.

They have truly visualized all-node information and maximized their information capabilities.

At the media outreach, many companies shared their 5G-A implementation practices. So as not to make this article too long, I will not introduce them one by one.

From these experiences, we can feel that 5G-A truly provides them with more efficient and cost-effective solutions.

2. The Necessity For Technological Competitiveness

We just introduced the benefits that promoting 5G-A can bring from the perspective of user needs.

In fact, from a macro level, 5G-A is needed for independent research and development of science and technology and national competitiveness.

The future is a digital era. The connectivity represented by 5G and the computing power represented by AI and cloud computing is the country’s core competitiveness.

Technology research and development is like sailing against a wave. If you don’t advance, you will retreat. We will lose this competitive advantage if we give up research on 5G and 5G-A.

5G, 5G-A, and 6Gare are the only way forward for future mobile communications development. The mobile communication network is a unified network that requires technical inclusion (5G eMBB, RedCap, NB-IoT, etc.), spatial expansion, and functional extension.

3. Misunderstandings And Misconceptions About 5G-A

To develop 5G-A, we still need to clarify several misunderstandings. At the World 5G Conference, Academicians mentioned several key points:

First, 5G-A is not intended to replace 5G completely, so there is no waste of investment as everyone imagines.
Secondly, 5G-A covers scenarios and will only be constructed where needed, so the total investment is not that large.
Thirdly, the 5G-A network side is implemented through software upgrades, so the engineering difficulty is not that complicated, and the cost is not that high.

These key points have clarified the public’s misunderstandings about the cost of 5G-A and can dispel many concerns.

Conclusion

Recently, news about 6G has set off a wave of enthusiasm. The IMT-2030 Promotion Group of the Academy of Information and Communications Technology released a series of progress on 6G, allowing us to learn more about 6G.

According to the plan, 6G is expected to be commercially available in 2030, which is still seven years away. In the past seven years, we need to use 5G-A to enhance 5G and pave the way for 6G.

Patiently and firmly promoting the implementation of 5G-A will lay a solid foundation for future 6G.