Hannes Ekstrom, head of 5G RAN at Ericsson, told Mobile World Live 5G slicing software launched today (26 January) would be a fundamental pillar to spur growth of the network technology and broaden its usage beyond consumer mobile broadband.

Ericsson stated its 5G RAN Slicing system allocates radio resources at 1 millisecond scheduling and delivers multi-dimensional handling across slices. It explained the set up is designed to support different service types over a common infrastructure, arguing it will help operators target new and high-revenue generating use cases including cloud gaming, smart factories, enhanced video and smart healthcare.

In an interview, Ekstrom explained 5G slicing would help to realise a lot of use cases, noting the technology was designed to be “broader” than current offerings which have been built on consumer-based mobile broadband services.

“We believe that the combination of 5G, together with network slicing technology, will enable our customers to offer new and customised services with guaranteed performance to both enterprise and consumer markets.”

Business case
Ekstrom continued to state the company had worked to ensure the solution guaranteed, and maintained, a certain level of performance, making it feasible for its customers to develop a viable business case from it.

“We believe this will maximise the 5G investments that our customers are doing, and enable new business growth from them,” he said. “We have done extensive research on the potential for network slicing from a business perspective. The software that we are launching here from a RAN perspective is one integral piece of realising 5G’s potential.”

Operators KDDI and Swisscom were named backers of the solution, while Ekstrom confirmed it held a lot of proof of concept trials with various other operators, including BT, Vodafone Group, SKT, NTT Docomo, AT&T and Deutsche Telekom.

He also revealed some elements of the solution required standalone architecture, which it saw as the “predominant architecture moving forward”.