Last week, the mobile industry gathered in Barcelona, Spain, at Mobile World Congress (MWC) 2018, to showcase the latest innovations in mobile technology. Over the last few years, 5G has quickly evolved from visionary statements in keynote presentations, to real demonstrations of 5G technologies and the opportunities they can bring. And at MWC this past week, we witnessed 5G on the brink of becoming a commercial reality. And once again, Qualcomm is right at the forefront, leading the way to commercial 5G mobile network and device launches that we expect to be on full display at MWC 2019

At MWC 2018 last week, in collaboration with leading infrastructure vendors and global operators, we demonstrated our industry-leading 5G NR interoperability testing compliant with the 3GPP global 5G NR standard recently completed this past December. The technical advancements demonstrated in the interoperability testing are quite amazing — multi-gigabit per second data rates, single-digit millisecond latencies, advanced antenna techniques, and unparalleled levels of scalability and flexibility. This standard-compliant interoperability testing serves as a significant milestone on the path to over-the-air field trials later this year and commercialization starting in 2019.

But how will 5G NR enhanced mobile broadband perform in the real world? This is a question we have been receiving quite a bit over the last year. As mobile operators plan for 5G NR mobile network launches, they want to get insights into the real-world capacity benefits of 5G NR as they overlay this new technology on their existing LTE networks and cell sites. In addition, mobile device manufacturers, app developers, and cloud platform providers want to understand the real-world performance that 5G NR mobile devices will bring, so they can begin innovating the next-generation of amazing mobile user experiences.

Answering these questions cannot fully wait for large-scale trials set for later this year to prepare for 2019. And that is why, last week, we introduced our 5G NR Network Capacity and User Experience Simulation platform — the industry’s first detailed simulation platform of 5G NR mobile networks and devices. Building upon Qualcomm Technologies’ unique capabilities to accurately model and simulate cellular systems, along with our global network experience and ecosystem collaborations, the simulation platform delivers quantitative insights to the 5G ecosystem on the expected real-world performance and user experience of 5G and Gigabit LTE devices, operating in Non-Standalone (NSA) multimode 4G/5G NR networks. At MWC Barcelona, the simulation platform was on full display in Qualcomm’s booth (Figure 1), showcasing two simulation studies conducted in Frankfurt, Germany and San Francisco, USA. The results from the 5G Network Capacity Simulation lend credence to the promise of 5G, with expected real-world performance that is substantially better than what is currently possible with 4G. Let’s take a closer look at the results.