Vodafone and Huawei test 5G in low and high spectrum bands

FRANKFURT AM MAIN, Germany -- Huawei and Vodafone Group made use of the NGMN Industry Conference and Exhibition, here, to unveil a test of 5G mobile connectivity in high and low frequency bands.

The deployment of 5G for both mobility and fixed services was a well-discussed issue at the event. Some mobile operators such as Verizon promoted fixed-wireless access services as an early use case for 5G technology, to resolve issues such as poor in-building coverage and lack of fibre deployment.

However, as Huawei pointed out in its release, the support of mobility capability plays a key role in the adoption of 5G applications such as augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR).

“It is believed that these applications could require more than 100 Mbps average data rates and gigabit speeds for multi-users in hotspot areas,” the China-based vendor commented.

The companies demonstrated 1.5-kilometre cell coverage in the lower C-band and 5 Gbps peak throughput for a single user in the high band. The pair claimed it is the world’s first 5G large-scale mobility field test of macro coverage in dense urban city scenarios.

The C-band is the original frequency allocation for communications satellites and uses 3.7-4.2 GHz for the downlink and 5.925-6.425 GHz for the uplink.

Luke Ibbetson, head of Vodafone Group research and development, said: "The results of these tests are an important development and help further our understanding of how 5G mobile connectivity performs in high and low frequency bands.”

Huawei and Vodafone signed a 5G strategic memorandum of understanding (MoU) in 2015 and a 5G Technologies Acceleration MoU in 2016.

The companies also discussed prospective candidate technologies for the 5G New Radio (NR) -- the current term used for the future 5G interface.

They said it has been demonstrated that filtered-OFDM, sparse coding multiple access (SCMA) and polar code work in a stable manner with massive multi-user MIMO (MU-MIMO) antenna technology.