Adoption of 5Gi - What is the Biggest Challenge?

Sometimes in the past, I had written a note titled "India's 5G Technology - Opportunities and Challenges ". The idea was to provide a complete background that led to the development of 5Gi and how its identification as the IMT 2020 standard was just the beginning of a long and tenuous process forward. The current note focuses on the biggest challenge that 5Gi will face while it juggles its way forward towards acceptance and adoption. And to make the argument simple and easy I have kept the note as short as possible.

5Gi Lacks Coordination with 5G

In order to appreciate this challenge one needs to understand what 5Gi is all about. It is nothing for a tweaked version (small incremental changes only) of 5G technology and is maintained and supported outside 3GPP (Third Generation Partnership Project). Why? As 5Gi is not blessed and supported by 3GPP - it has been independently developed by TSDSI by borrowing 3GPP specifications, and therefore any development of the two (5G & 5Gi) into newer versions is totally uncoordinated and random.

5Gi Needs Unquantifiable Perpetual Work

As 5Gi lacks synergies with 5G, even to maintain the current version of 5Gi, the vendors will need to work perpetually on activities that cannot be estimated/quantified. The reason - 5Gi is riding on 5G (moving platform) which is being constantly evolved into new releases (laced with new features and capabilities). As 5G is evolved by 3GPP, the work that was earlier done to maintain compatibility (of 5Gi with 5G) gets disturbed, and therefore the vendors have to redo all the earlier development work again to restore the compatibility of 5Gi with 5G.?This will increases the cost of 5Gi devices significantly - as all the work (development, testing, inter-working, etc) has to be redone each time a new release of 5G gets developed by 3GPP. TSDSI has already visualized this difficulty and hence had written to 3GPP requesting reservation of bits for 5Gi in the 5G specification. The request was turned down by 3GPP , as doing so will dilute the flexibility of 3GPP to evolve 5G into new releases with better capabilities and features.

Conclusion

From the above discussion, it is clear that in order for 5Gi to gain acceptance it needs to integrate with 5G. This will make the features easy to evolve and maintain, thereby reducing the cost of development. Not doing so will make the adoption of 5Gi virtually impossible - as no vendor will like to spend unquantifiable resources perpetually to maintain and develop 5Gi as 5G evolves into the future with better features and capabilities.

(Views expressed are of my own and do not reflect that of my employer)

PS: Find the list of other?relevant articles? in the embedded link.