Rogers Communications has announced the launch of Canada's first commercial 5G Standalone (SA) network services, enabling mobile customers with 5G SA capable devices including Google Pixel 6/6 Pro smartphones to connect to the new network, which was built exclusively with Ericsson. Users with suitable devices will automatically connect to the 5G SA service where it has been rolled out and Rogers says it will be onboarding other major devices later in the year. The announcement came six months after Rogers reported completion of its national 5G SA core network rollout in October 2021, alongside the country's first 5G SA device certification.

Rogers' CTO Jorge Fernandes declared that the 5G SA network 'will bring immediate benefits to customers by increasing coverage, scalability and availability, and improving network response times, enabling a world of new use cases.' A press release highlighted that 5G SA brings lower latency and network slicing capabilities, expands the 5G footprint and supports future enterprise and consumer applications, such as dedicated private networks, public safety systems and edge computing for AR/VR consumer applications. Rogers added that its 5G SA 'is built to scale massively and will support the unprecedented growth of IoT devices in the years to come.'

Thanks to TeleGeography for this industry update.