We have been working to bring more capabilities to our 5G network to support adaptable network experiences for our customers.
Our 5G rollout so far has focused on expanded coverage, reliability, reduced latency, increased speed, and allowing more devices on the network. . Standalone 5G is a new technology that goes further and allows us to scale the network to support our customers’ entire experience.
Autonomous 5G technology allows us to divide our leading mobile network into separate, secure slices that can be fine-tuned to meet the needs of multiple customers.
These slices can be customized to provide an assured network experience with guaranteed minimum upload and download speeds, lower latency and faster application responsiveness, greater security, and greater reliability. So while one person may want high speed and low latency, and another may require the opposite, we can adapt to their needs. It’s different from today where everyone’s experience is the same.
For you, that means gaming on 5G is more responsive and consistent. This means less waiting for pages to load and feeds to refresh, even in a crowded wagonload of people doing the same thing.
Think of 5G as an extra-wide highway, and we’ve just broken it up into enough lanes for everyone to travel at their own speed.
Standalone 5G isn’t necessarily about a network metric (like speed or latency) as much as the overall experience.
It allows a customer who wants ultra-high bandwidth for their services to access them, and another who needs low latency to access them, while offering the latest improvements in security and reliability. .
If you have a Samsung Galaxy S22, S22+ or S22 Ultra smartphone purchased from Telstra, the Android 13 firmware update your phone receives will enable standalone 5G support.
Once this update is applied, users with compatible devices will continue to operate seamlessly on the standalone network in the background. This is another step to make our 5G network more efficient, more secure, more reliable and better suited to the needs of businesses and consumers.
What is standalone 5G and how does it improve on existing 5G?
Until now, 5G has relied on 4G infrastructure to help devices communicate. Using this infrastructure has allowed us to rapidly deploy upgrades enabling 5G radio in many locations, delivering improved capacity and speeds.
The standalone 5G network will deliver new network experiences using a range of new features and services to support not only consumer services, but also new and emerging use cases of enterprise and digitalization. industry. In addition, this technology increases our automation, security and resilience capabilities.
These use cases include some of the technologies we showcased at Telstra Vantage this year: we demonstrated the potential of network slicing by using a ‘slice’ to reserve radio network resources for use cases using video analysis. Use cases demonstrated livestock tracking and monitoring, using a robot to pick and sort oranges from trees, and a drone to inspect a silo after a fault was detected by a sensor.
Standalone 5G capabilities provided the required speed and data quality along with increased security, to enable real-time data processing using computing at the network edge.
Edge computing is complemented and enhanced by autonomous 5G technology and capabilities, enabling data processing and application execution closer to customers by leveraging an autonomous 5G network connection, unlocking the potential of a range of new, innovative and more reliable services.
5G Standalone uses purpose-built 5G infrastructure at every link in the network chain, from the 5G radio access network to the 5G core.
This means that the latest protocols that require 5G end-to-end are able to work and create efficiency in how devices operate on the network. The 5G autonomous architecture also makes it possible to set up new “slices” of personalized services in minutes rather than days or weeks, using a technology called “network orchestration” that automates what would otherwise be processes typically highly manual in previous mobile generations.
The hidden appeal of standalone 5G is the new functionality it enables when operating end-to-end on our network, as it creates a better personalized experience for customers.
An example of this is network slicing, which means we can allocate and control bandwidth, storage, and data processing power for a particular customer or application on our 5G network. It allows us to design custom solutions to meet the needs of our business partners and industries, including things like extremely low latency and rock-solid reliability.
For consumers, standalone 5G will enable enhanced experiences in areas such as gaming – delivering more consistent performance and immersive interactions, by incorporating augmented and virtual reality technologies.
An enhanced overall experience will be provided by the integration of lifestyle applications such as online ordering, on-demand content viewing and social media interactions.
We see huge potential for standalone 5G to transform the operations of our enterprise customers in industries such as mining and agriculture, where a custom-designed wafer can operate as a hybrid network or emulate a private 5G network with guaranteed characteristics such as resiliency and bandwidth. It simply means that our partner companies can plan innovative connectivity and application designs that allow them to work more efficiently and streamline their operations.
How does standalone 5G compare to existing 5G and millimeter wave?
Existing 5G applications that use the mixed 4G/5G core network have already proven to be fast, reliable and able to handle increased user numbers compared to 4G. If you’ve ever used 5G, you’ve experienced it yourself: 5G is superior to older network standards, we’ve seen many devices like smartphones and mobile broadband hotspots deliver performance impressive in our tests. For our consumer customers, 5G is a big step forward.
mmWave 5G addresses a different need, delivering ultra-fast performance experiences over shorter distances to allow many users to share the full potential of cellular 5G at once.
Especially in peak usage environments like a sports stadium, mmWave 5G is the technology that enables tens of thousands of users to have a good experience simultaneously. As the number of 5G devices and the demand for high throughput, low latency applications in dense urban environments increases, mmWave 5G will be able to scale to meet these expectations.
5G already offers coverage and speed improvements over 4G, and mmWave supercharges them for blazing fast connection speeds over shorter distances. Standalone 5G can leverage mmWave in the same way for compatible devices.
It works with these other technologies to help us ensure that your 5G experience remains consistent and reliable while providing new network capabilities, even as our network expands to support new businesses and applications on 5G.
