With the forthcoming 3GPP Rel. 16, 5G New Radio will be expanded into the unlicensed 5 GHz and 6 GHz bands. Called NR-U, there are two modes of operation: non-standalone wherein operators can aggregate the unlicensed bands with licensed 5G frequencies to bolster capacity similar to LAA, and standalone wherein an enterprise could use unlicensed spectrum to deploy a private cellular network.
During a recent RCR Wireless News webinar, Qualcomm’s Yongbin Wei, vice president of engineering, discussed the differences between asynchronous and synchronous sharing of unlicensed frequencies; both can support a range of legacy and nascent use cases although the former does so in a more efficient manner which could be necessary given the breadth of potential 5G applications.
