Vodafone and Nokia demonstrate 5G in Australia

Vodafone and Hutchison's Australian operator has carried out a demonstration of what it calls 5G, achieving combined upload and download speeds of around 4.84 Gbps in a public lab trial.

The demo at the University of Technology Sydney used equipment from Nokia and achieved latency of 2.8 milliseconds. In terms of spectrum, it used 200MHz of bandwidth in the 4.5GHz band.

The tests included the downloading of a 50GB season of a TV show in around 10 seconds, and the transmission of eight simultaneous virtual reality streams at a speed of 4.5Gbps.

According to local reports of the demonstration session, Vodafone Hutchison Australia chief technology officer Kevin Millroy said 5G would be needed to deal with annual data growth rates that currently stand at 40 per cent.

A key local rival, Optus, is also working with Finland's Nokia on its quest for 5G, and said earlier this month that it intended to carry out tests next year.

Telstra, which is aiming to use the 2018 Commonwealth Games as its showcase 5G test bed, conducted Australia's first live 5G trials with Ericsson last month.

The university where Vodafone and Nokia's demonstration took place is a hub for research into next-generation radio and software-defined networks, which will be core for the deployment of 5G when it finally rolls around.

For Nokia, the demonstration will feed back into its efforts to develop 5G-capable equipment for operators globally.

The vendor has already upgraded its AirScale radio equipment and small cells to enable the equipment to access LTE-Advanced, which is regarded as a key upgrade on the path to 5G.

Rival vendor Ericsson is also working on improvements to their existing equipment to enable 5G services. In August the vendor revealed it would launch the world’s first commercial 5G radio equipment for massive MIMO and multi-user MIMO in 2017.

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