Cellular operators’​ tough choices … Do they need to deactivate 3G or 2G to boost 4G and 5G NR Non-standalone

Traditionally it was cost-effective for operators to integrate 4G solution into existing 2G/3G infrastructure without buying expensive IMS VOLTE platform. In the early days of 4G rollout, spectrum licensing was not quite easy as 4G demanded large bandwidth of 20MHz to deliver the high capacity it promised. In certain hotspot areas, HSPA+ traffic was peaking and LTE was required to take the excess traffic away. Soon massive LTE rollout was necessary.

Using Marketing tools, operators are coming to this conclusion

• Data traffic demand is exponentially growing while circuit-switched telephone is declining in urban centers.
• deploying R10/R11 LTE is getting hard because of spectrum shortage. large number of component carriers are required to achieve carrier aggregation of upto 100MHz.
• Customers in urban centers need 4G availability all the time which makes HSPA+ mostly idle and only good for filling in LTE coverage holes.
• In rural areas where operators get large revenues, Circuit switched telephone is dominant.

Engineers know that LTE is IP-network while 2G/3G support circuit switched calls. This means still 2G/3G are required to make calls from LTE phone in an interim process called circuit switched fallback (CSFB). By the time fully blown IMS system is put in the network, CSFB will go away (although this important transition is slow).

Many operators in the world are deactivating their 2G or 3G systems to make room for future data demand explosion that will require extensive presence of 4G and the new 5G. 5G will bring many new things in reality like machine to machine communication, remote surgery, auto-driving cars, enhanced multimedia ultra HD applications and massive MIMO support.

The better approach would to be to deactivate 3G network and leave 2G. Many traditional phones are still highly available and a lot of people still use both in urban and rural. 3G systems experience massive cell breathing and pilot pollution. In Africa 3G systems occupy B1 which could be refarmed into LTE.

In the end it would be for operator’s business strategy and long term vision that will decide this course. Market penetration of smartphone capable of 5G will likely increase in the near future and a lot of customer wont be happy with the current setting especially with the introduction of ultra high speed application that require ultra low latency.

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