The COVID-19 pandemic caused a six-month delay in the 5G standardization process at 3GPP, but work is back on track, according to ETSI Director General Luis Jorge Romero.

Continuation work is underway at 3GPP on Release 17, now slated for completion in mid 2022, and the first workshop on radio-specific work for Release 18 wrapped earlier this month.

The pandemic caught almost everyone off guard, and ETSI, like most organizations, wasn’t prepared for a completely remote work environment. “It’s been a big impact for all of us,” including day-to-day changes in how ETSI and its many working groups and committees operate, Romero told SDxCentral in a recent phone interview.

“Despite all this telework and all these tools that we have enabled, there are things we cannot plan for,” he said. Maintaining a social compact requires a recognition that “there are many different realities in each one of us,” including personal situations, responsibilities at home, and access to resources that foster a viable working environment.

ETSI also helped members of its technical groups adapt to unpredictable conditions by delegating some procedural decisions. Maintaining progress on standards development has been easier for smaller groups, Romero said. 

Some committees that used to meet for a full week shifted to multi-week cycles with virtual meetings that ran just a few hours in the middle of the day. “Because of the way we work, we have been quite flexible at leaving each different working committee to adapt themselves to the way they prefer working,” he said. 

3GPP instituted “huge changes,” particularly on working methods and rules about decision making because everything previously required a physical presence, Romero explained. “Each one has had to face their specific difficulties, but I think we’ve come out of it quite well under the circumstances.”

The ongoing pandemic still prevents most committees from meeting in person, but physical meetings remain the preferred method because it streamlines agreements when controversies are encountered during discussions and allows committees to achieve progress at a faster pace, according to Romero. 

These challenges notwithstanding, Romero said he is confident that 3GPP has worked through the bottlenecks and won’t face further delays on 5G standard development. Meanwhile, as the pace of 5G deployments globally continues, Romero notes that some operators need additional help to achieve broad coverage while adhering to 3GPP standards.

“If you want to really deploy all these great features that are very fundamental to 5G, you need to have proper deployment of technology because otherwise you start falling into small islands and you don’t have continuity of the service,” he said.

5G advantages such as network slicing and low latency can’t be fully achieved without full and proper coverage throughout the system, Romero explained. “Network slicing and being able to have bespoke services deployed all across is one of the big differentiators of 5G versus previous Gs,” he said.

The measure of 5G’s success will hinge on the prevalence of different industries signing up for 5G and deploying rich services on these new networks, he said. “The reflection of that will come when we start seeing business models that match all these different sectors that will be the ones really benefiting from this technology.”

5G remains young and under development, but in hindsight Romero admits that an earlier rush on Release 15, prompted by operators that wanted to deploy fixed wireless access on 5G, wasn’t ideal and will probably not be repeated again. “The result of this is that some of the work then had to be reworked for the final Release 15, so we had a little bit of a hiccup there,” he said. 

ETSI would rather not rush the process going forward, but rather let standards breathe a little and stick to the timelines agreed to on the standards development calendar, Romero added. 

Looking ahead to forthcoming releases, 3GPP will increasingly focus on virtualization, artificial intelligence, security, and network management, he said. “We are putting a lot of effort in trying to look at all this has to do with network management, and of course radio is an important part of it, but network management is the other important piece where we are also concentrating efforts and what it has to do to enable autonomous networks.”

Security is also “very high on the agenda these days,” Romero said, adding that security and virtualization go hand in hand. 

3GPP expects to complete Release 17 in the third quarter of 2022, and Release 18 work will commence in early 2022. Functional commercialized use of 5G standards packed into Release 18 probably won’t be realized until 2025.