The year 2021 has been an exciting one for 5G. Not only did we see an impressive number of 5G commercial launches around the world, but 3GPP also continued its charge toward completing 5G NR Release 17. On the personal front, this has also been a year of progress and changes, as I recently took on the new challenge of leading the overall 3GPP standardization effort at Qualcomm Technologies — a critically important role that overlooks the future direction of cellular technologies. I would like to take this opportunity to thank my friend and colleague, Lorenzo Casaccia (Qualcomm Europe, Inc.), for his great leadership for the past 12 years as the 3GPP standards lead. Looking forward, I am excited to be working alongside him in his expanded role to usher in the next chapter of 5G and beyond.
Just this week at the quarterly 3GPP RAN Plenary meeting, 3GPP reached a key milestone on the path to realize the 5G vision. After a successful 5G Advanced workshop in June and multiple rounds of lively e-mail discussions with a large set of participating 3GPP companies, we now finally have an approved Release 18 (Rel-18) package. This is a new set of exciting projects that aims to deliver a balanced 5G Advanced evolution (see figure below), which will address the short and longer terms needs of enhanced mobile broadband and expanded vertical use cases across the end-to-end 5G system.
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