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Assessing 5G technology leadership

Assessing 5G technology leadership

Standardization leadership

Technology leadership can provide companies with various benefits including first-mover advantage, higher profit margins, and improved reputation. In telecommunications, open standardization is essential to create communication systems and ecosystems. Thus, one of the strongest indications of the technology leadership in telecommunications is standardization leadership.

Standardization leadership

With so many technology players contributing to the development of 5G technology, it can be difficult to establish who are the real leaders in the field. There are a number of factors which indicate a company’s leadership in 5G and beyond.

  1. We believe that a company’s contribution to the open, consensus-based standards development process in 3GPP serves as one of the strongest objective indications of technology leadership for the evolution of 5G and beyond.
  2. Also, understanding the impact of key companies in standardization within the O-RAN Alliance is an important indication of technology leadership in Open RAN development.

Standardization leadership in 3GPP

In these below reports, we analyze standardization leadership for 5G in 3GPP – the main standardization forum for mobile communications systems – in four areas:

  1. Number of approved contributions
  2. Specification impact
  3. Quality of contributions
  4. Chair positions

By combining these four metrics, and assessing RAN and core network areas separately, we’re able to provide a holistic and fair assessment of technology leadership within 3GPP from the development of 5G through to its evolution.

Standardization leadership in 3GPP Release 17

The Release 17 specifications were functionally frozen in March 2022 and are expected to be finalized in June 2022.

Release 17 will facilitate use cases, especially in the industrial and consumer domains. Together with enhancements aimed at existing use cases and applications such as mobile broadband, industrial automation, and mobile edge computing, 3GPP Release 17 introduces support for new ones including cloud gaming and industrial sensor networks.

Download the report

Standardization leadership in 3GPP Release 15 & 16

In this report, we evaluate the standardization leadership for the fundamental 5G (3GPP Rel-15) and initial 5G evolution (3GPP Rel-16).

Download the report

3GPP fact sheet

3GPP has both the depth and the width and has been driving the cellular communications standardization for more than 2 decades. 3GPP fact sheet provides interesting facts and data about 3GPP. Some of the important facts covered in this report are:

  1. Approved documents per year/Approved Ericsson documents per year
  2. Unique delegates/Unique Ericsson delegates
  3. Number of specs
  4. Size of the work groups
  5. Regional distribution of 3GPP contributions and much more.
Download 3GPP fact sheet
 

Standardization leadership in O-RAN Alliance

The O-RAN Alliance defines specifications in areas of RAN automation, cloudification, and disaggregation. In below report, we analyze Ericsson’s impact on the O-RAN Alliance and show that Ericsson is a leading company in the Open RAN development in following areas:

  1. Co-chair positions
  2. No. of contributions in selected work groups
  3. Leadership in O-RAN software community
Download the report