A public consultation into the proposed new requirements for 5G customer equipment in the industry for use in Australia was launched by Communications Alliance. Comms Alliance is planning an update of its Requirements for Connection to an Air Interface of a Telecommunications Network Standard. The new requirements are part of this scheduled update.

The proposal will cover the technical conditions and requirements for both 5G New Radio and 5G NR / E-UTRA equipment by a new Part 5. The basis of the requirements is the 3GPP Release 15 5G standard.

The push to develop 5G networks is based on enabling extremely high data rates per area even with a significant number of devices connected to the network. 5G also fosters extremely low latency as well as reliable support for critical applications. Furthermore, the 5G technology can support an expanded range of terminal speeds and it can also be used in different frequency bands, which range from 450Mhz to 86GHz.

Several operation bands for 5G equipment covered by the requirements are included in the new standard. Comms Alliance reflects the bands that Australian mobile operators will most likely use in their 5G networks. The bands included are those from the low and mid-band spectrum. The range of the bands in these spectra is from 850MHz to 3.6GHz. Bands in the mmWave spectrum between 26.50 to 29.5GHz are also included, as well as the bands in the spectrum between 832MHz and 915MHz. The latter is said to be for 5G supplementary uplink equipment.

The need to comply with specified IMEI security standards and designated core protocol specifications are also included in the requirements. However, it should be noted that there are separate requirements for 5G standalone network equipment and equipment that supports carrier aggregation. The interworking of 5G standalone and non-standalone networks also bear separate requirements.

To reflect the proposed introduction of the 5G equipment section, several changes to existing sections were included in the draft update to the customer equipment standard. The updates include emergency call service requirements to reflect the identifiers used by 5G equipment. These emergency call service requirements also have the new IMEISV identifier.

To align with the proposed 5G requirements, existing requirements for LTE equipment have also been updated. In this case, the new draft requirements exclude the receiver's total radiated sensitivity and total radiated power test cases from compliance conditions.