2019 is the year mobile network operators will begin to roll out 5G services. The technology is designed to be almost infinitely flexible to support a wide variety of services, and is therefore highly complex. So while there are many new opportunities to be discovered, there is also a lot to learn. As the ancient saying goes, a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.
Of course, the early steps on this journey are somewhat tentative. The 5G-infrastructure deployments this year will be Non-Standalone (NSA); using 5G frequencies for high-speed data exchanges while relying on 4G technologies to manage connections to infrastructure and servers. So far, the test specifications for 5G devices are not fully finalised. For NSA, although the 3GPP TS38.521-3 transmitter and receiver tests for interworking with LTE in Frequency Range 1 (FR1) below 6GHz and in the FR2 mm-wave bands (24GHz-52GHz) are quite well developed, others such as performance...