O2 Germany bundles four spectrum bands to hit 5G SA speed milestone

Naturally it's pretty excited about this, noting that the speeds it hit in the test are almost twice as fast as high-speed fibre-optic network connections. That's a bit of a stretch, but you can see where it's coming from.

It carried out the test on a live network at its Potsdam innovation cluster with vendor partner Nokia. The pair brought together spectrum in O2's existing 5G bands – 700 MHz and 3.6 GHz – with frequencies it uses for 4G, at 1800 MHz and 2.1 GHz. The bands used for that four-way carrier aggregation can hit 2 Gbps in a laboratory environment, Telefonica noted.

It used a Samsung S24 Ultra smartphone to measure the network speeds, it said.

"For the first time, we have bundled four frequencies in the standalone 5G network. The speeds achieved in the test illustrate the possibilities that 5G standalone offers in practice. They are a taste of further technological developments and the network expansion of the future," said Matthias Sauder, Director Networks at O2 Telefónica.

"For our customers, the progress in 5G technology means even faster mobile internet and better network quality in the future," he said.

Telefonica and Nokia announced plans to work together on 5G SA APIs in Germany and Spain a few months ago with the aim of building new 5G use cases for the consumer, business and industrial markets. Sauder's comment above arguably shows why: the telco is pitching its speed achievements on 5G SA from the faster Internet angle rather than waxing lyrical about exciting new services the technology could enable. And faster mobile Internet is unlikely to be much of an additional revenue generator for the telco community.

The more innovative applications of higher speeds on 5G SA are still very much "in the future."

That's not to say Telefonica is dragging its heels though; it is further ahead than many in the rollout of standalone 5G. Indeed, 5G SA has been live across its 5G network since October last year, it points out, a 5G network that now reaches 96% of the population in Germany. That's pretty good going, particularly considering that many of its peers have been reluctant to take the plunge. Dell'Oro reduced its growth forecasts for the mobile core network market for the fifth time in July, citing slow build-out of 5G SA networks; there were around 50 commercially deployed 5G SA networks at the time, it said, the same figure it reported at end-2023.

Speaking of the core, it's worth noting that Telefonica Germany renewed its contract with Ericsson as its core network supplier this summer, despite having done a cloud core deal with Nokia and AWS just weeks earlier. This 5G SA speed test with Nokia shows, amongst other things, that vendor diversity is still very much the name of the game.