Thursday 21 November 2019

Swisscom Plans to Deploy 5G Standalone (SA) in 2020

We wrote about Swisscom's 5G Fast and 5G Wide when they launched their 5G network earlier this year. In a recent presentation at Total Telecom Congress, Christoph Aeschlimann, CTO & CIO of Swisscom AG provided a bit more detail of what it is. This can be seen from the picture below


While 5G Fast aggregates the C-band spectrum Swisscom owns, 5G Wide relies on Dynamic spectrum sharing using 4G spectrum only.

In addition, he presented Swisscom's the next phase of 5G deployment, Standalone 5G with 5G Core. This can be seen below:


As can be seen the 5G SA trial is planned for H1-2020 and first deployments are expected in H2-2020. If you are unsure of what the difference between SA and NSA 5G is, please refer to our 3G4G tutorial here. While it does not say what 5G Network Architecture Option Swisscom will be deploying, it is assumed to be Option 2. Nearly all operators are thinking of that option when moving to 5G core, except a few like NTT Docomo that believe that Option 7 will be needed in the interim, followed by Option 4 and then Option 2.


Finally, a slide that lists Swisscom's latest facts and figures. Just in case you were wondering, Mio, is an abbreviation for "millions" as a unit indicator in some financial markets, such as the German, Swiss and Dutch markets.

Christoph Aeschlimann, CTO & CIO of Swisscom wrote a LinkedIn post titled "90% 5G coverage in 2019. How to turn the impossible into reality" back in August. It's worth a read.

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