Public consultation for BEREC draft Feasibility study on development of coverage information for 5G deployments
The project is essentially a feasibility study to explore and highlight the expected benefits from the consistent and coherent presentation of coverage information for 5G deployments for use by market sectors other than mobile network operators (e.g. by new vertical applications and use cases; automotive, industrial, environmental monitoring use cases).
In February 2019, BEREC launched an early call for inputs from NRAs, which was well responded to by NRAs, however, the results of that survey showed that NRAs generally considered it to be premature to consider providing information on coverage of 5G deployments aimed at verticals.
In June 2019, BEREC also launched an early call for inputs to gather views of specific verticals on some relevant issues including connectivity requirements such as in terms of network coverage and specific Quality of Service (“QoS”) requirements. Four submissions were received. In BEREC’s view this level of response reflects the fact that verticals are part of a highly diverse set of industry sectors working on future business cases, which could be facilitated within the context of a 5G ecosystem but that it is too early to set out specific details on same now.
This project is part of BEREC’ aims to facilitate early stakeholder engagement exploring the potential of publishing coverage and/or QoS information and metrics, in particular BEREC is conducting an initial feasibility study whose aims are to:
- Describe the expected benefits from NRAs’ presentation of coverage information and QoS aspects for use by verticals implementing use cases such as automotive, industrial, environmental monitoring, etc;
- Attempt to describe the metrics that are of relevance to the verticals.
Essentially, this work may be viewed as being akin to BEREC’s previous work on Common Position on information to consumers on mobile coverage in 2018 (BoR(18) 237). In that body of work, the potential benefit for consumers was recognised in terms of harmonising coverage maps in Europe so that consumers may them make informed choices about coverage service levels.
The timing of this feasibility study is also relevant, as preparations for the roll out of 5G networks are already under way in most European countries.
Considering the abovementioned BEREC within this feasibility study intends to clarify what are the needs of verticals in order to make qualified decisions regarding the electronic communications networks and services suited best for their current and future business in the light of 5G.
The response to the public consultation will serve as inputs for the needs of verticals.
Practical details of the public consultation
In accordance with the BEREC policy on public consultations, BEREC will publish a summary of all received contributions, respecting confidentiality requests.
The public consultation will run from 10 October to 28 November 2019.
All stakeholders are invited to submit their contributions to the following e-mail address: [email protected]. Further enquiries about the consultation may also be submitted to this address.
The overall size of the e-mail (including attachments) should not be larger than 2 MB.
After submitting the contribution via e-mail, an automatic reply will be generated. If this confirmation e-mail is not received, the submission of the contribution was not successful and it should be submitted again.
We strongly encourage all stakeholders to submit their contributions as early as possible. Contributions received after the above mentioned deadline will not be taken into account.
Contributions should preferably be sent in English.
All contributions will be published on the BEREC website, taking into account requests for confidentiality and publication of personal data. Any such requests should be clearly indicated as: “Consider this contribution as confidential” or, if submitted via e-mail, by clearly stating which information is considered confidential.