An EE cell phone retailer, operated by BT Group, in Studying, U.Ok. in 2020.
Jason Alden | Bloomberg | Getty Pictures
BARCELONA, Spain — British telecommunications large BT says it expects to launch its first so-called stand-alone 5G community in 2024.
Howard Watson, BT’s chief expertise officer, advised CNBC that the telco group plans to modify on its stand-alone 5G community, which is commonly referred to within the trade as “true” 5G, later this yr.
“Others are speaking about it. They’re speaking about it. However we’re working to get the precise ecosystem in place, which implies the precise set of units,” Watson stated in an interview with CNBC on the Cellular World Congress tech commerce present in Barcelona, Spain.
That comes after a trial the corporate carried out with Swedish telco infrastructure agency Ericsson and chipmaking large Qualcomm demonstrating community “slicing.” Community slicing is a configuration that permits a number of networks to be created on the identical widespread bodily community infrastructure.
“We have already been making certain that the SIM playing cards that our clients have of their present 5G units can do 5G stand-alone,” Watson added. “And so as soon as we predict there’s sufficient vital mass to have an actual proposition, with some slicing behind it as properly, we’ll launch that, and that shall be later this yr.”
To this point, rival U.Ok. carriers Vodafone and Virgin Media O2 have already each switched on 5G stand-alone options, with BT’s EE, the U.Ok.’s largest cellular community, but to launch its personal stand-alone community. It is ready to see if Apple’s new iPhone 16 helps 5G stand-alone in Europe when it launches this autumn.
What ‘5G stand-alone’ means
5G stand-alone would offer you a slice of the community, or a certain amount of bandwidth with sure latency dedication. Every community slice is successfully an remoted a part of the community that is designed to fulfil the necessities requested by a sure software.
So, for instance, in the event you’re a gamer and also you want super-low latency to play a recreation competitively on-line, you could possibly use 5G stand-alone to get latency of 9 to 10 milliseconds, near what you get from an HTTP connection to your private home.
Latency is necessary for players because it measures response delays. The upper the latency, the extra lag you get whenever you’re taking part in a recreation. This implies much less clean gameplay.
“You could not need that 24 hours, seven days every week,” Watson stated. “So we’d have a extremely versatile pricing mechanism that claims you may have that from 6 p.m. to eight p.m.”
“So bringing it to life in propositions for patrons is how we’ll promote it reasonably than with, come and purchase some ‘stand-alone.'”
Milind Kulkarni, vice chairman and head of InterDigital’s wi-fi labs, stated that community slicing is one step in a variety of technological upgrades that can result in so-called 5G Superior, an evolution of the 5G community.
“5G provides a incredible platform with numerous functionality to assist many use instances, and we have now to proceed our focus in enabling extra vertical markets and growing its capabilities as we march by 5G Superior,” Kulkarni advised CNBC.
5G stand-alone is completely different from 5G Superior, although. 5G stand-alone refers back to the improvement of a 5G community that is not being constructed on prime of 4G cores. Whereas 5G Superior is a whole evolution of the community.
BT and different community operators need to 5G stand-alone as a method to earn more money from the next-generation networks they first began deploying round 5 years in the past.
Way forward for 5G
Naturally, 5G plans are costlier than 4G.
However shoppers have been struggling to know the worth of 5G — which is commonly solely incrementally quicker than 4G — when many areas of the U.Ok. and developed nations nonetheless lack 5G connectivity.
To get 5G stand-alone networks off the bottom, community operators first want smartphone makers like Apple and Samsung to make sure their units have stand-alone capabilities.
Apple hasn’t performed that in Europe, Watson stated, and he is holding out to see what occurs with the following iPhone to see if the tech large will make its smartphones 5G stand-alone-ready.
BT’s client enterprise had a serious rebrand in 2023, which centered on the launch of a full suite of companies, an space that telco corporations have had much less success scaling than digital giants equivalent to Meta, Google, Apple and Amazon.
BT is the U.Ok.’s main telecom firm, working fastened and wi-fi networks throughout the nation. BT’s client division has roughly 30% market share in broadband and cellular companies.
Its enterprise phase works with bigger enterprise clients.
It has been working the EE cellular community since buying it for £12.5 billion ($15.8 billion) in 2016.
