While in the U.S. the 3.5 GHz band is set aside for shared usage, in many other countries the prime mid-band spectrum is being allocated for use as service providers deploy 5G services. In Australia, Telstra, working with Ericsson and Intel, is claiming the “first end-to-end 5G non-standalone (NSA) 3GPP data call on a commercial mobile network.”
In December the global standards body 3GPP finalized the NSA variant of the 5G New Radio standard, which uses an LTE RAN and core with the addition of a 5G component carrier.
