News from GCF's Q1 2019 Steering Group Meeting in São Paulo city, Brazil
- 15 Apr 2019
- Roy Church (Samsung) – 2019 SG Chair
GCF held its first Steering Group meeting of 2019 in sunny São Paulo city, Brazil, co-hosted by DEKRA and Vivo (Telefonica Brasil).
For GCF, there were a number of firsts; the first GCF meeting in Brazil and the very first GCF meeting south of the equator. This shows how our global reach continues to deepen and its breadth of applicable markets grows.
The preceding workshop was exceptionally well attended with 70 + attendees and was certainly a credit to Brazilian Telecoms’ industry capability. Participants included key players in the mobile Brazilian industry and several GCF board members.
The role of the Steering Group is to discuss and make decisions on how to progress the GCF certification scheme that facilitates testing of mobile devices, ensuring a certification programme which aims to keep testing costs down while delivering compliance to standards and interoperable mobile devices in the market place.
5G: tomorrow has arrived
GCF continues to align with technical development in the industry and has already activated the first 5G work item for SA option 2 band 41, with more expected over the coming quarters. To support the growth in 5G, a new work item was approved adding new NR CA/DC band combinations from the 3GPP Release 16.
GCF maintains its close co-operation with industry partners and has agreed to produce a quarterly 5G status report showing progress made in work item activation, validated test platform availability, 5G field trial networks and certified devices. This report will be for both GCF internal use as well as external to the wider industry starting with NGMN.
To facilitate use of the GCF programmes in other industries, we are investigating how to efficiently share information outside of telecoms for certified 5G modules and devices.
Mission Critical
In line with GCF’s aim to encompass all sectors of the industry, and following introduction at the GCF’s annual general meeting, the Steering Group approved a number of changes allowing mission critical communication operators to join GCF.
Additionally, in support of mission critical communications, GCF will attend Critical Communication World in Kuala Lumpur (18-20 June).
New Verticals
GCF’s flexible approach and willingness to adopt new certification practices is allowing the expansion of our successful and well used certification scheme to new industry areas and models.
Now for the very first time, the Steering Group announced the readiness of a new certification which is not linked to the GCF legacy certification of a mobile device. The new 'oneM2M only’ certification will enable interested manufacturers to certify compliance to oneM2M requirements without requiring this to be bundled with device certification for compliance e.g. to 3GPP requirements. The ‘oneM2M only’ certification will not require a GCF membership or certification fee in 2019 and will be launched by the middle of the year.
Support for Latin America
GCF’s continued support in Latin America will extend to attendance of the GSMA 360 LATAM in Mexico City (June 4-6) and potentially a dedicated GCF workshop being held in Brazil in the future.