5G standalone core: enabling edge deployments and unleashing massive IoT at scale

5G with non-standalone core ushered in a new era for mobile, with the first large scale deployments from 2019. However, the restrictions related to using the 4G evolved packet system (EPS) as the anchor for 5G essentially reduced the New Radio band’s status to that of carrier aggregation. The early 2020s have seen the first rollouts of 5G standalone (SA) core, but as of Q2 2022 there were fewer than two dozen 5G SA deployments.

Mobile technology generations have been a succession of evolutions and revolutions. On the air interface, 4G to 5G is an evolution from one form of orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) to another. However, within the 5G core, standalone replaces the 4G world of virtualised network elements running on a handful of hardware platforms, with 5G cloud native micro services that could be running anywhere on any platform.