Ericsson claims 25 Gbps 5G field trial with MU-MIMO

Swedish kit vendor Ericsson says it has achieved peak downlink throughput speeds in excess of 25 Gbps in a trial using MU-MIMO and beam tracking technology.

The trial, inevitably described as ‘5G’, was witnessed by execs from NTT Docomo and KT. Both MU (multi-user) and Massive MIMO were used to increase throughput, while beam-tracking is used to optimise millimeter band performance.

“Both companies are already conducting joint outdoor trials to understand how 5G will really perform in the field,” said Seizo Onoe, EVP and CTO at NTT Docomo. “This will enable us to plan for the new and enhanced services that we will be able to offer with 5G. We will be in a good position to highlight our commercial 5G capabilities in 2020.”

“Though our work with Ericsson, KT is on-track to preview the innovative new 5G services at the PyeongChang 2018 Olympics,” said Dongmyun Lee, CTO at KT. “We appreciate that Ericsson is enabling us to trial 5G capabilities with the advanced features, like beam tracking, MU-MIMO and Massive MIMO, that we will need as we plan for 5G commercialization.”

“Ericsson enables our leading operator customers to experience advanced 5G features achieving real-world performance benchmarks,” said Arun Bansal, SVP and Head of Business Unit Radio, Ericsson. “With Ericsson’s 5G Radio Prototypes, we are already supporting MU-MIMO, Massive MIMO and beam-tracking to make the greater bandwidth available in millimeter wave spectrum commercially viable.”

In other pre-MWC Ericsson news the company announced it has been by Vodafone India to manage its fibre network and that it has extended its smart car partnership with Volvo by supplying infotainment software and support.