The industry has seen unprecedented growth and adoption of 5G. Owing to its flexibility and holistic implementations,5G New Radio (NR) has achieved a steady stream of deployments worldwide. The 3rd Generation Partnership Project(3GPP) continues the evolution of 5G technologies and recently completed the standardization of Release 17. This release includes further enhancements and new capabilities that improve not only enhanced Mobile Broadband (eMBB) services but also extended support for the industry’s verticals and new use cases.
5G NR features in Release 17 include enhancements for user equipment (UE) power saving, uplink coverage,multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO), positioning, among others. Additionally, new 5G services and capabilities have been introduced in Release 17, such as multicast and broadcast services (MBS), reduced-capability (RedCap) devices, and non-terrestrial networks (NTN). Hence, Release 17 becomes the baseline for the upcoming Release 18 5G technologies,dubbed 5G-Advanced.
