Howard Watson, BT’s chief technology officer, told CNBC that the telco group plans to switch on its stand-alone 5G network later this year.
"Others are talking about it," Watson said in an interview at the Mobile World Congress tech trade show in Barcelona. "They're talking about it. But we are working to get the right ecosystem in place, which means the right set of devices."
That follows a trial the company carried out with Swedish telco infrastructure firm Ericsson and chipmaker Qualcomm demonstrating network slicing. Network slicing is a configuration that allows multiple networks to be created on the same common physical network infrastructure.
"We’ve already been ensuring that the SIM cards that our customers have in their current 5G devices can do 5G stand-alone," Watson added. "And so once we think there’s enough critical mass to have a real proposition, with some slicing behind it as well, we will launch that, and that will be later this year."
So far, rival MNOs Vodafone and Virgin Media O2 have already both switched on their 5G stand-alone solutions, with BT's EE, the UK's largest mobile network, yet to launch its own stand-alone network.