News
Companies reach 15 Gbps per user, sub 3-millisecond latency using big chunk of 15-GHz spectrum.
Telia Company and Ericsson on Thursday completed an outdoor 5G field test that achieved a speed of 15 Gbps per user.
Conducted in Kista, Sweden, the test also achieved a latency below 3 milliseconds, which is important for supporting services that demand near real-time connectivity, such as augmented reality and autonomous vehicles.
"This is a great achievement and stepping stone towards taking 5G to our customers in Sweden and Estonia [in] 2018," declared Mats Svärdh, head of networks and IT infrastructure at Telia’s global services and operations division.
It is worth noting though that Telia and Ericsson used a lot of spectrum to reach such a high throughput – 800 MHz of 15-GHz spectrum, in fact.
By way of comparison, LTE-Advanced networks use carrier aggregation (CA) to combine up to a maximum of five carriers, each one typically ranging from 5 MHz to 20 MHz.
Millimetre-wave (mmWave) spectrum, like that used by Telia and Ericsson this week, does promise far larger channel bandwidths of potentially 1 GHz or more; however, these frequencies are unlikely to be allocated for mobile services by the time the first 5G networks enter commercial service.
"Our knowledge and learnings from testing in a real outdoor environment will be crucial to understand and develop the 5G technology and networks needed to meet our customers’ future requirements on our services in a digitalised society," Svärdh said.
