Classroom Companion: Business

21.2
 5G and Net Neutrality
5G systems may violate some of the net neutrality principles. The 5G technology is 
an extension of the Internet to mobile devices. For technical reasons (e.g., band-
width efficiency, dynamic bitrate allocation, and forward error correction to reduce 
packer-loss rate), the mobile network provider must know more about the type of 
signal to set up a connection between the mobile user and the network. For this 
purpose, some degree of signaling identifying the service is required over the inter-
face and in the mobile network. This is called the IP multimedia subsystem (IMS). 
In addition, the provider may offer different priorities and meet certain latency 
requirements for different services as shown in 
.
Table 
21.1
. Technically, this is 
referred to as quality of service (QoS) management. In principle, QoS management 
makes it possible for the mobile provider to charge different services differently and 
to offer different user experience depending on the type of service. This may 
 
Chapter 21 · Net Neutrality

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infringe with the net neutrality principle. It is then up to national regulations and 
market supervision to ensure that net neutrality is not violated.
3GPP defines four QoS parameters for 5G systems resulting in seven service 
classes as shown in the table.
5
Minimum guaranteed bit rate. Some services such as telephony, real-time video, 
and real-time gaming require a minimum guaranteed bit rate, while services 
such as web-browsing services and buffered video-streaming services require no 
such guarantee. Telephony and real-time video require a minimum guaranteed 
bitrate because speech samples and video pixels are generated at a fixed rate at 
the encoder and the signal must be fed to the decoder at the same speed for 
proper decoding.
5
Priority has to do with the priority given to packets queuing up at buffers. A 
packet with priority 1 will be put in the front of the queue but after priority 1 
packets that are already queued up. Equivalent rules apply to the other priori-
ties. Generally, real-time services such as telephony, signaling, and real-time 
gaming should be handled first, while packets belonging to a web-browsing 
service may wait.
. Table 21.1 QoS parameters for 5G mobile networks