Category: 5G

I want to thank all readers for their interest in the post and the discussions we had during the past months about 5G health issues. There was a high number of supporting comments and requests for clarification, but also quite a few critical comments to both of my published posts (What’s wrong with the “studies” and 5G health […]

You may wonder why I’m writing about Dual Connectivity. After all, it comes from LTE in Rel-12, when we are currently within the Rel-16/17 timeframe. The reason for this is that the DC from LTE is treated as a baseline. The enhanced version is incorporated within 5G as one of the main features to allow the so-called Multi-RAT DC (MR-DC). If we look from a broader perspective, we have a multitude of use cases for DC, including LTE-DC, NR-DC, LTE-NR-DC, NR-LTE-DC, LWA. Therefore, this post aims at shedding light on the different aspects of DC, being the legacy feature, which can be extrapolated towards the current situation. 

We’ve been bringing the tech trends to the readers of our blog, by continuing to write on certain topics (like 5G, SD-WAN, Wi-Fi networking). As a summary from 2019, we have compiled here a list of the 5 most popular posts from our website.

3GPP Release 17 is about to be started soon. It will mostly be about enhancing and “further” enhancing 5G features in different areas. Regarding the overall timeline, the content of Rel-17 is to be defined in Q4 2019, and the aim is to froze it in Q3 2021.

It was a very interesting event, despite being small in the number of participants. We could listen about the current 5G status from different angles including perspectives from vendors, solution providers, verticals, standardization, governments and research. The one I was missing though, was the MNO “reality check”. I believe that the industry reached now the time, when we are slightly moving beyond the 5G hype and switch from “5G is the answer – now, what was the question” to “who pays for the new infrastructure and spectrum”, being the reality check.

This year’s CROWNCOM conference was held on 11-12 June, in our hometown – Poznan, Poland – discussing the following topics: ML for spectrum management, spectrum sensing, REM, spectrum sharing and management, spectrum assessment and valuation, HetNet and hybrid networking, current 5G standardization and future topics for 3GPP, RAN slicing, business models innovation, which are summarized in this post.

The photon energy of electromagnetic radiation in the microwave spectrum, is by at least 5 orders of magnitude too low to cause any harm in living cells. The only possible impact is a heating effect, but the energy applied by a mobile phone is at least 4 orders of magnitude lower than that used by microwave ovens and can heat human tissues by less than half a degree. The situation around studies of health risks connected to mobile phone usage is discussed. Serious studies show that mobile network and mobile phone usage have no adverse effects on health.

Each time a tower for a cellular network is built or planned to be built in a city or near a rural settlement, there is a new discussion about health issues of mobile phone or network radiation. It is about time to put things back into perspective. I’d like to deal with the reality of mobile network radiation in this post.

The “history” of 3GPP system “entering” the unlicensed spectrum regime seems to happened already a long time ago. Tight LTE interworking with WiFi is one way for the MNOs to offload traffic. The other one, discussed within this blogpost, is based on a specialized design of LTE system to be able to cope with ISM/license exempt bands’ special requirements e.g., fair coexistence with other users of this spectrum (e.g. Legacy WiFi).

2018 was a very interesting year for us and technology. We introduced our IoT product “Souly”. 5G entered the normative work in standardization and released the first “version” of 5G. Wi-Fi introduced new security schemes and changed nomenclature. The networking world shifted towards SDN/SD-WAN solutions.