The fifth-generation mobile communications (5G) demonstrated to be one of the main catalysts for the pervasive digitalisation of our society: ultra-high bandwidth, low latency and increased connectivity density are some of the main characteristics of 5G which Vertical industries are leveraging to implement innovative applications for business [EC5GCYBER].

Despite the considerable progress of the last few years, state of the art 5G networks nowadays (up to 3GPP Release 16) are not yet at the stage of complete achievement of all the challenging performance requirements and features promised, both in terms of specifications and prototypes and products. For example, 5G deployments today are occurring at limited scale (up to city-scope in various countries); most of the current releases target eMBB services with 5G NR but still do not allow coexistence of different types of vertical applications (i.e. eMBB with URLLC and/or mMTC, as per ITU classification); network slicing specified by 3GPP and network monitoring with analytics are not fully supported and do not span multiple operator domains; etc.

The standards communities, as well as research and industry, are continuing to work towards the realization of a number of additional evolutionary stages for 5G to achieve truly production-level support of diverse applications for various vertical industries.

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Source: 5GZORRO