The fifth face to face meeting of the ISG THz was held on 5th and 6th March 2024 in Oslo. The venue was Telenor headquarters, only 15 minutes outside Oslo city centre. The meeting was attended, in a hybrid mode, by 29 participants representing 19 companies. This comprised industry and academia from 10 countries, including participants from China, Korea and USA. During these days, Oslo gave a first flavour of spring with sunny weather and temperatures up to plus 8 degrees, after a mid-winter period of heavy snow and rain.

The Telenor building
(Source: Wikimedia Commons, Hogne, Telenorbygget Fornebu fra vest (8. juni 2018), CC BY-SA 4.0)

Per Hjalmar Lehne, Meeting host and Work Item 2 Rapporteur, wished the participants welcome, introducing highlights from Telenor’s history, which dates back to 1855.

Participants of the Oslo meeting
(Source: Li Jian)

During the first part of the meeting, the Group Report from Work Item (WI) 2 was approved unanimously by the whole group. After more than one year of continuous consensus-based and detailed work, this was the last task before its publication. This GR identifies frequency bands of interest in the sub-THz and THz range, describes the current regulatory situation and identifies the incumbent services to be considered for coexistence studies.

Having already the first two deliverables published, ETSI ISG THz decided to inform the Key SDOs partners via an outgoing Liaison about this important milestone and about the progress of its works. The ISG THz Chair presented the first draft for this LSout and opened the floor for gathering the additional feedback from the delegates.

The meeting continued with the discussions on the remaining two WIs, from the initially agreed work programme. Just a reminder that at its beginnings, ISG THz agreed to have 4 informative WIs mapped on its whole Terms of Reference document that will serve as the starting points for the future normative work. Good progress was made on those two as well, handling all the contributions submitted by 15 companies and reiterating again the plan to have those deliverables published by the end of the year.

WI 3 (Channel measurements and modelling in the THz bands) discussions included 15 contributions, including the report from the rapporteur. There were also two late contributions, which were given time. Most contributions were results from studies, either measurements, analytics or simulations, and will be used to populate the GR, which is due end of 2024.

The report from the rapporteur of WI 4 (RF hardware modelling) emphasized the need for more contributions on specific topics, which also was emphasized by the ISG THz Chair, Thomas Kürner. Following this, there were four contributions, one of them a text proposal on transmitter power amplifier modelling.

In the evening of the first day, the attendees in person joined for a dinner with a panoramic view of Oslo on top of the new Munch-museum.

Social event at the Munch museum
(source: Per Hj Lehne (left), Taro Eichler (right))