Huawei claims first 4.5 GHz large scale 5G field trial

Such is the appetite for 5G ‘firsts’ that each new announcement is becoming ever more nuanced.

Huawei’s latest effort is qualified by both spectrum and scale, but does seem to have some validity in terms of raising the 5G bar, a bit.

In Yokohama, Japan Huawei and NTT Docomo set up a ‘5G base station’ and conducted a trial using technology compliant with the current 3GPP New Radio standard agreements. It used 200 MHz of spectrum in the 455 GHz band via 64 transceivers to serve 23 separate pieces of user equipment (UE), both static and mobile. At total of 11.29 Gbps of throughput (around 1 Gbps per UE) was claimed with a latency of 0.5 milliseconds.

“Huawei is now putting a lot of resource and energy to 5G NR foundational technology development, market development and product solution development,” said Dr. Wen Tong, CTO of Huawei Wireless Networks. “With the expert team we put together, the collaboration between Huawei and Docomo is now on the fast track and the progress is very encouraging, this achievement is extremely important to form the foundation of future 5G.”

“Our success in 5G large-scale field trial in the 4.5 GHz band brought the whole industry one step closer to 5G commercialization by 2020,” said Takehiro Nakamura, VP and MD of NTT Docomo’s 5G Laboratory. “Docomo and Huawei have been expanding their collaboration on 5G from R&D to international spectrum harmonization initiatives for 5G since December 2014.”

It has been a busy day for Huawei’s PR department. As well as contributing to the keynotes at AfricaCom 2016, Huawei has launched a new high performance computing platform, a product that allows GSM and UMTS to be deployed over just 5 MHz of bandwidth and has claimed the electrical smart meter to nun on NB-IoT while unveiling a new smart city strategy. Nice to see it’s not just Ericsson and Nokia that like to send their press releases in bunches.