Delivering seamless Standalone in the busiest locations
By Greg McCall, Chief Networks Officer, BT Group
We’ve all been there: a delayed train meaning you need to join an important conference call from a packed rush-hour train station, but the network won’t connect because it’s so busy. The promise of 5G Standalone (5G SA) – the newest technology beginning to rollout across the world – is the opportunity to stay connected at the busiest of times in the most crowded of places.
A tremendous amount of work is taking place to ready ourselves for the arrival of EE’s own 5G SA network. We’ve already built and moved onto our new dual-mode 5G core, engineers are upgrading RAN sites up and down the country, and we’re incrementally testing and tweaking to ensure that we deliver on our ambition to be the UK’s best 5G SA network upon launch.
What that means is greater performance, capacity and reliability from day one. But 5G SA isn’t just about what’s on offer at launch, it’s also about creating a platform for advancements down the line in terms of the new services and capabilities it will deliver to consumers and businesses alike. Short-term evolution, long-term revolution.
To that end, there is also a huge amount of vital work taking place in BT’s Network Services, Architecture and Research departments not only to prepare the 5G SA network for launch later this year, but also to futureproof it so that we’re ready to capitalise on industry developments which are on the way in the months and years ahead. Ultimately this is where 5G SA will enable game-changing performance which, coupled with the cloud-native driven benefits of scalability and speed of delivery, will be the catalyst for new services to thrive.
That brings us to today’s announcement, in collaboration with our close partners Nokia and Qualcomm, that we’re the first European operator to achieve 5G carrier aggregation with five component carriers (5G CC CA) – you can read more here. Led by our Networks team at Adastral Park, with support from BT Research, this is the latest milestone in 5G innovation for us, and promises to deliver potentially even faster 5G SA downlink speeds in the future, of up to nearly 2 Gbps. What this means for customers is a significant boost in performance in areas of high demand when the 5G SA device requires a high-speed connection, for example when watching live sport at a train station in rush hour.
This follows on from previous carrier aggregation ‘firsts’ aimed at boosting 5G SA performance across both downlink and uplink, where demand for greater speeds is growing in importance for a number of both existing and emerging use-cases, including live-streaming and video calls.
Today’s achievement has been delivered with one eye on the future, too. The 5G SA handset ecosystem right now is relatively small, but we expect to see more and more devices come to market by the early part of next year which are capable of supporting this technology. So we’re laying down a marker to say that at EE, as the UK’s best and most reliable network1, we are building capabilities into our network to support both the devices of today and the future.
We want to ensure that we really deliver on the promise of 5G SA for our customers, and an ongoing focus on innovation and research will be key to achieving this. Whether that’s through carrier aggregation advancements like today’s, demonstrating network slicing capabilities for guaranteed quality of service, or exploring how we can support the emerging IoT ecosystem through the likes of 5G RedCap technology, we’ll continue to prioritise advancements in network quality to support the evolution of the 5G services ecosystem.
1 Best Mobile and Most Reliable Mobile Network based on the RootMetrics® UK RootScore® Report: H2 2023. Tested at locations across the UK with the best commercially available smartphones on 4 national mobile networks across all available network types. Your experiences may vary. The RootMetrics award is not an endorsement of EE. Visit ee.co.uk/claims for more details.
