Optus and Huawei have claimed a single user transmission speed of 35 gigabits per second achieved over the 73 GHz band in a 5G speed trial just completed in Sydney.
The trial was undertaken by the two companies with the aim of exploring spectrum efficiency at millimetre (mm) wave frequencies (above 30GHz), which Optus says are key to realising the promise of 5G networks.
“Australia is well positioned to take a pioneering role in the development of 5G technologies globally. We believe Optus, as one of the Australasia’s leading telecommunications and entertainment providers has the partnerships and the expertise to take a leadership position,” Dennis Wong, acting managing director, Optus Networks said.
“The possibilities with 5G are endless. Through our strategic partnership with Huawei we are undertaking the necessary preparation, testing and trials to tackle the 5G opportunity head on.”
{loadposition peter}The trial is an Australian initiative as part of the 5G collaboration Memorandum of Understanding between Optus parent company Singtel and Huawei, and utilised technologies such as mm wave and Polar code.
Yan Jun, managing director of Huawei’s carrier business group, says Optus and Huawei have taken a “significant step forward with achieving the highest downlink peak rate in Australia as of today and we see this embarks a new mobile broadband era for us”.
“Huawei began 5G research in 2009 and has committed to invest a minimum of US$600 million in 5G research & innovation by 2018.”
Wong says Optus is working to lay the building blocks for Next Generation 5G networks, “which will provide the capability to download a 1080p movie in seconds – and enable things such as massive Internet of Things, extreme broadband and ultra-low latency applications”.
In October this year, Optus implemented Cloud Baseband technology with Huawei which pushed peak speeds through inter-site carrier aggregation at the AFL Grand Final.
Optus has said that later next year it will deploy Coordinated Heterogeneous Network and trial Massive MIMO (multiple-input and multiple-output) technologies it says are a pre-cursor to 5G’s Joint Reception and Massive MIMO concept.