On June 29, the 5G New Calling Industrial Roundtable was successfully hosted by GSMA during MWC Shanghai 2023. This roundtable gathered global operators, device suppliers, terminal chip vendors, industry partners, content providers, and more, to discuss New Calling in terms of development direction, challenges, opportunities, and ecosystem construction. They also shared their practices and future plans on how to promote the prosperity of New Calling.
This roundtable is one of the activities of the 5G New Calling Foundry project, which was established by GSMA at the beginning of 2023 with the purpose of promoting the development of New Calling. Based on this project, partners from the industry chain work together to develop typical application scenarios and clarify the industry development direction by means of roundtables, webinars, white papers, and forums. Henry Calvert, Head of Network at GSMA, said that this Foundry project has attracted attention from the GSMA Board of Directors, who hope that New Calling can rejuvenate voice services and bring more business opportunities.
Henry Calvert hosting the 5G New Calling Industrial Roundtable
Basic industry standards are now ready for developing New Calling. Issam Toufik, 3GPP Mobile Competence Centre Director and ETSI CTO, noted that 3GPP R16 has introduced the data channel (DC), on top of existing voice and video channels. In December 2021, 3GPP initiated the Next Generation Real Time Communication (NG_RTC) project in R18, enhancing network capabilities by adding new network elements, such as the DC Signaling Function (DCSF) and Media Function (MF). This functional architecture, frozen in June 2023, provides a strong standards support for the implementation of New Calling.
Issam Toufik, 3GPP Mobile Competence Centre Director and ETSI CTO
With the support of standards, leading operators commenced network construction. Song Yue, Chief Researcher of China Mobile Research Institute and Chairman of 3GPP CT4, said that China Mobile has positioned 5G New Calling as a strategic product, aiming to build a calling-based service platform and develop differentiated 5G applications for users. China Mobile has trialed multiple 5G New Calling services in Jiangsu, Zhejiang, and Guangdong provinces in the first half of 2023, and plans to roll out these services nationwide in Q4 this year. The leading operator in Middle East, Zain Kuwait, also innovatively proposed 5G New Calling as future-oriented 5G services, aim to promote communication experience and explore enterprise market, in order to meet Zain strategy in terms of DAIGITILISATION. Some other leading operators in Europe, Asia Pacific and Latin America also have started Proof of Concept (PoC) tests on New Calling and steadily promote New Calling service innovation.
Song Yue, Chief Researcher of China Mobile Research Institute and Chairman of 3GPP CT4
New Calling is a significant breakthrough in the voice industry. For one thing, it helps operators transform their business model from voice-only operations to content operations and create more revenue streams. For another, it allows users to have a more enjoyable experience and communicate more efficiently during calls. Chen Haiyong, President of the CS&IMS Domain of Huawei Cloud Core Network Product Line, thinks that the key to success of New Calling is creating high-quality content and building a robust ecosystem. This requires the New Calling solution to provide an open network architecture. In addition to adopting standard APIs to facilitate content production, this solution separates the network from services to simplify interconnection with various individual and vertical industry applications. In this way, the New Calling network can always keep a high stability and reliability, irrespective of changes to applications running on it. This greatly contributes to the prosperity of the application ecosystem.
Chen Haiyong, President of the CS&IMS Domain of Huawei Cloud Core Network Product Line
GSMA has recognized 5G New Calling as an important Foundry project and rolled out the first demo case — real-time translation — on its official website. According to Henry Calvert, the New Calling industry development white paper and more new cases will be released in the near future. He also called for more industry partners to join the 5G New Calling Foundry project, discuss and solve problems, develop more cases, and promote the development of New Calling.
For more information about the 5G New Calling Foundry project, visit https://www.gsma.com/foundry/projects/5g-new-calling/.