Bharti Airtel and Chinese telecom gear maker Huawei have successfully conducted India’s first 5G network trial under a test setup at the former’s network experience centre in Manesar, Gurgaon.
Abhay Savargaonkar, Director-Networks at Bharti Airtel, said the test is small but a significant step in its journey towards the next generation 5G mobile networks, which could offer data speed up to 100 times faster than current 4G networks.
India plans to roll out 5G services for consumers by 2020 and to achieve that objective, the government had in September this year set up a high-level forum that will evaluate and approve roadmaps and action plans to bring in the latest technology in the country.
Telecom secretary Aruna Sundararajan recently said that the telecom department was expected to finalise a roadmap for 5G services by June this year.
The telecom industry – currently reeling under debt of more than Rs 7 lakh crore mainly due to cut-throat competition triggered by the entry of Reliance Jio Infocomm – has urged the government to go slow on 5G spectrum auction, but clearly Airtel wants to be fully prepared for the new technology.
“We’re moving quickly to begin collaboration towards 5G interoperability and development testing (IODT) based on the 3GPP (3rd Generation Partnership Project between groups of telecommunications associations to set 5G new radio standards) R15 standards,” Savargaonkar said to ET Telecom.
During the test trial, a user throughput of more than 3 GBPS was achieved using the setup. This is the highest measured throughput for a mobile network in 3.5 GHz band with 100 MHz bandwidth and end-to-end network latency of approximately 1 msec. The setup included 5G RAN operating on 3.5 GHz band, 5G Core and 50GE Network Slicing router.
Emmanuel Coelho Alves, director, wireless marketing, at Huawei, said the show with Bharti Airtel demonstrated the performance capability of 5G in 3.5 GHz band. “We shall also continue to work with vertical industry players to develop wider ecosystem use cases beyond enhanced mobile broadband,” he said in a statement.
Airtel’s efforts around 5G technology isn’t limited to its collaboration with telecom gear vendors such as Ericsson and Nokia, reported ET Telecom.
