DT and Huawei smash 5G barrier with 1.2 Gbps LTE demo

Huawei and German giant Deutsche Telekom have taken a step back from the 5G hype by pumping out speeds of a whopping 1.2 Gbps in an LTE demo.

The Berlin-based demo was a pure speeds’n’feeds play, and achieved some eye-watering data rates using 4×4 MIMO and five carrier aggregation, the first this correspondent has seen. The trial was done “in the wild”, according to DT, and meant the usual catch of “under lab conditions” can well and truly take a back seat.

To be fair 1.2 Gbps is an impressive feat, and one conducted over the mobile radio to show it is possible in the real world for real users on real phones, instead of the optimised scenarios in a vendor’s lab. The inference from DT is that this is in aid of supporting super high quality video spamming the network (KT was talking about 8K mobile video streaming recently…) as well as “detail rich games” which is presumably going to be led by VR.

Of course 5G was mentioned, how could it not be, but the announcement was more about using this super-dooper new LTE service to drive the evolution of wireless towards the fifth gen instead of needless hyperbole and marketing hype. The name for the new service? LTE-Advanced Pro.

“As you can see, our network delivers. We are ahead of our time and ahead of the competition,” boasted Claudia Nemat, DT’s Board Member for Europe and Technology.

Meanwhile in other Huawei news, the Chinese megavendor has launched a software-defined security solution over at its Huawei Connect event. The solution is intended to be a guarantee of security for enterprise tenants’ applications hosted on cloud services. Adding a splash of NFV, Huawei said it virtualizes hardware security devices while automating deployment and delivering efficiency gains.