Euro mobile standards chiefs eye tiny beauty: It's the KEY to 5G

The European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI), which sets the standards for mobile comms, has just started work on five specifications for millimetre Wave Transmission – the 30GHz to 300GHz range.

The new Industry Specification Group on millimetre Wave Transmission (ISG mWT) held its first meeting last week and will look at what’s already known about working at these frequencies from practical hands-on experience, as well as what the potential applications might be.

It's expected that the building a spec that governs the frequencies over 35GHz will be the key to 5G which uses MIMO to get high bandwidth and will need 500MHz of contiguous spectrum.

ISG mWT will put together an overview of V-band (40GHz – 75GHz) and E-band (2GHz – 3GHz) worldwide regulations and do an analysis of V-band street level interference. The group will also look at the plans the semiconductor industry technology has for using these frequencies.

ETSI elected Renato Lombardi of Huawei Technologies as the chairman while Nader Zei of NEC Europe was elected vice chairman.

“ISG mWT was conceived as an industry-wide platform to prepare for large scale usage of millimetre wave spectrum in current and future transmission networks, by improving the conditions to make millimetre wave spectrum a suitable and convenient choice for all stakeholders," said Lombardi.

The expectation is that there will be huge numbers of small cells which are controlled by over-arching cells at lower frequencies.

Of the hundreds of standards bodies attempting to define a spec, only ETSI and the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) have the requisite standing among the mobile industry at large to achieve this. It is expected that ETSI will define the standard and the ITU will ratify it. ®