Saturday December 31, 2022 | 9:00 p.m.
The Government, through the National Communications Entity, resolved new advances regarding the necessary regulations for the implementation of 5G communications technology in Argentina, with the approval of the General Regulation of the service, the allocation of spectrum bands that They will be tendered in the first half of next year, and the deadlines for companies that must migrate to other frequencies.
The Enacom board of directors approved this week the General Regulation of the Reliable and Intelligent Telecommunications Service (STeFi), which establishes the general rules for the new services that will arrive with 5G technology and upcoming developments, and which are characterized by low latency, that is to say, a connection that will allow the realization of services in real time.
The approved regulation (STeFI) does not replace the regulation of Advanced Mobile Communications Services, which is in force for the provision of services with 2G, 3G and 4G technology.
From Enacom they specified that the new regulation that establishes technical conditions to categorize communications as reliable and intelligent “are the ground for 5G technology and future evolutions.”
They specified that 5G is “a fixed and mobile service, given the characteristics and possible use cases for this technology, unlike its predecessors whose use translates into mobile services.”
The great differential of 5G focuses on “low latency”, which in the Regulation approved by Enacom establishes that the reliable and intelligent service must have a “latency of less than 15 milliseconds in the access network”.
This level of communication closer to real time will allow the expansion of solutions such as remote surgery, since a surgeon will be able to remotely control a robot that carries out an operation in real time; or self-driving vehicles, which require “dialogue” with other cars, with road sensors and traffic signals.
In the latter case, the millisecond of latency can mean the difference between a safe trip and an accident.
The low latency allows a practically instantaneous response to any device connected to the network, but also 5G technology has the capacity to connect a minimum of one million devices per square kilometer and in fact it is expected to boost the communication between machines called the Internet of things (IoT for its acronym in English).
Although it is still hard to see it as usual, in addition to smartphones there is a variety of equipment for daily use that is connected to the Internet.
Watches and medical bracelets are the most recognized, but there are also perimeter alarms, surveillance cameras and GPS installed in the car; as well as a variety of sensors that generate alerts about soil moisture, the vibration of a bridge, and the full range of uses for robots such as excavating machines in the oil and gas and mining industries; and equipment to defuse explosives.
All these possibilities, together with the automation of industrial plants, require more reliable communications than the current ones.
The Regulation approved by Enacom, in addition to latency of less than 15 milliseconds, establishes as requirements “theoretical and reproducible peak speeds in the laboratory for 100 MHz TDD bandwidth channels with Massive MIMO antenna technology: For the 2 Gbps downlink and 150 Mbps for the uplink”.
The technology must also “support users moving with speeds of up to 500 kilometers per hour” and have the ability to “interoperate with other fixed and mobile networks.”
The head of the Professional Council of Telecommunications Engineering (Copitec), Miguel Pesado, stressed the importance of the regulation that “takes parameters from the international standard of the 3GPP group of the International Telecommunications Union.”
“Everything is in compatibility with the international standard,” said Pesado in dialogue with Télam, to add that “you have to look at compatibility issues with other services that already exist and with other uses that have been given to the 3.5 gigahertz band “.
In this sense, Enacom established the deadlines for companies that are operating in the 3.5 Ghtz band to migrate to other frequencies, in Resolution 2386.
Fountain: telam
