Key figures in the development of 5G assembled last week at the annual Brooklyn 5G Summit in NYC. In two presentations and a panel discussion, attendees heard encouraging updates about the standardization process and its ability to support a global standards-based commercial rollout of the new wireless technology as early as 2019.

Perhaps most significantly, the experts are confident that everything is on track for Release 15 of the 5G New Radio specifications, scheduled for June of this year. Release 15 is critical to the development of 5G because it provides specifications that manufacturers can use to manufacture equipment. For instance, it will describe how 5G base stations will be configured and how those base stations will communicate with smartphones.

The good news is that a decision by the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP)—a unification of seven telecommunications standards development organizations—to accelerate the 5G New Radio (NR) schedule back in 2017 has not encountered any major setbacks.

Release 15 is so critical to the commercial viability of 5G NR that 3GPP decided early in 2017 to split the release into two phases to ensure its success: the Non-Standalone (NSA) version and the Standalone (SA) version. This phased approach appears to be working.