Telecom Italia has announced it expects 5G services to be greenlight in San Marino by the end of the year, making it the first 5G state in Europe. If only they had the handsets.

With TIM engineers plugging away in Faetano to hook up 3GPP Rel15 standard radio equipment with Massive-MIMO technology, the aim is to have complete 5G coverage by the end of the year. With the team back in head office running the final tests on 26 GHz millimetre waves in the 26.5-27.5 GHz frequency range, the hope is San Marino will become a living lab to test out new 5G services.

“The installation of the first 3GPP 5G site is the peak of a virtuous cycle of innovation launched by TIM a few years ago, working with the standardization bodies and contributing since the beginning to the ITU R ‘Vision’ recommendation which defined the founding concepts of 5G, subsequently guiding work on the technical specifications for 3GPP Rel15 and later,” said Elisabetta Romano, CTO at TIM.

“Nokia has developed an end-to-end 5G Future X portfolio that will deliver unprecedented capabilities and efficiencies for customers such as TIM, allowing them to transform their service offering,” said Marc Rouanne, President of Mobile Networks at Nokia. “Working together we will explore the potential of 5G services that align with TIM’s vision of meeting the future demands of a diverse range of industries and consumers.”

The first stages of the deployment plan were complete with various successful trials run over the 3.5 GHz frequency band, though it seems the 26 GHz millimetre waves is what is catching the attention of the team. Equipment will be deployed from September to move trials from the Turin R&D centre to the San Marino living lab, focusing on areas such as Industry 4.0, public safety, Smart Parking and Gas & Water Metering applications for smart cities and digital tourism, including virtual reality.

Having signed a memorandum of understanding with the government of the microstate in July last year, San Marino could actually be one of the first country’s in the world to experience the 5G bonanza. That said, this should not be taking as a sign things are all rosy across the European continent; hooking up a microstate with a land mass of 23.63 mi² and a population of just over 33,000 should be viewed as nothing more than an experiment for TIM. Europe still lags behind North America and Asia in the race to 5G, but progress is being made.