In the ISG F5G F2F#19 plenary meeting held in Sophia-Antipolis, France from August 27th to 30th 2024, the creation of a new Work Item (WI) for F5G-A Use Cases Release 4 was agreed. The new work item is proposed by China Unicom and has eight supporting organizations including Orange, China Telecommunications, ZTE Corporation, CTTC, Huawei Technologies France, CAICT, POST Luxembourg and CICT. Mr. Yue Sun from China Unicom is the Rapporteur of this WI.

In ISG F5G standards, the use case WI is one of the key documents of each release, which introduces new scenarios and new services to the fibre optical networks. These use cases not only benefit the users/customers from residence, enterprises and vertical industries, but which also includes improvements to the operation and maintenance of optical networks, which is very beneficial for network operators.

The ISG F5G initiated the F5G-A Use Case Release 3 standards in November 2022 and published in June 2024, which introduces 17 use cases covering the six characteristic dimensions of F5G-A (ETSI GR F5G 021):

• enhanced Fixed Broadband (eFBB)
• Real time Resilience Link (RRL)
• Guaranteed Reliable Experience (GRE)
• Optical Sensing and Visualization (OSV)
• Full-Fibre Connection (FFC)
• Green Agile Optical network (GAO)

The ISG F5G has recently completed the F5G-A Release 3 specifications and while continuing work on the F5G‑A Release 4. The agreement to create the F5G-A use case Release 4 WI is one of the milestones of the F5G‑A release 4 standardization.

This new WI will continue to study more use cases according to the F5G-A six characteristic dimensions. Some potential example use cases are Digital Twin for Smart City, real-time object recognition, acoustic mapping of railway operations, and real-time road traffic monitoring.

This WI is expected to be finished and be published at the end of 2025. ISG F5G calls for contributions on innovative use cases.