5G Spectrum

5G radio is designed for flexible utilization of all available spectrum options from 400MHz to 90 GHz including licensed, shared, and unlicensed; FDD and TDD duplexing; and narrowband and wideband allocations. 

Following are the three main spectrum options:

The millimeter wave spectrum above 20 GHz can provide wide bandwidth up to 1–2 GHz, which ramps up the data rate to a very high 5–20 Gbps for extreme mobile broadband capacity. Millimeter wave is mainly suited for local usage like mass events, outdoor and indoor hotspots, and fixed wireless use case. Millimeter wave can also be used for offloading traffic from the low band in the busy hotspot areas. One use case for millimeter wave is providing very high capacity to public transport systems like trains or trams.

 

The mid-band spectrum at 2.5–5.0 GHz will be used for 5G coverage and capacity in urban areas by reusing existing base station sites. The spectrum around 3.5 GHz is attractive for 5Gbecause it is available almost globally, and the amount of bandwidth can go up to 100MHz or more per operator at that frequency. The peak data rate is 2Gbps with 100MHz bandwidth and 4×4 MIMO. 5G coverage at 3.5 GHz can be similar to LTE1800 coverage if massive MIMO beamforming is used.

Low bands below 3 GHz, for FDD, are needed for wide area rural coverage, low latency and high reliability, and for deep indoor penetration. Extensive coverage is important for the new use cases like IoT and critical communication. The low band could be 700MHz, which was made available in many countries at the same time as 5G. Another option is 900MHz, which is mostly occupied by 2G and 3G today, or 600MHz in the United States. Any other FDD bands can also be refarmed to 5G. LTE and 5G can be deployed on the same band using a dynamic spectrum sharing solution, which makes the refarming a smooth process.

Following are the Global 5G spectrum options.

The mid-band spectrum between 2.5 and 5.0 GHz can be found in most countries as well as the millimeter wave spectrum in a growing number of countries. The first 3GPP phase for 5G provides support up to the 52.6 GHz frequency range, and higher frequency bands will be addressed in later 5G releases. At low bands, 5G can utilize new 600 or 700MHz allocations, or do refarming of the existing bands. 5G can combine multiple bands together to boost the performance beyond what is achieved with just a single band. The solution can be carrier aggregation or dual connectivity.