Nokia Networks (NYSE:NOK) and NYU Wireless kicked off their inaugural Brooklyn 5G Summit last year, and they're back this year with another installment, this time featuring a Nokia demo of a 10 Gbps system.
Specifically, Nokia, along with National Instruments (NI), is demonstrating a 10 Gbps peak rate system over the air at 73 GHz. The 10 Gbps system in the demonstration uses 2x2 MIMO using single carrier Null Cyclic Prefix modulation and frame size of 100 micro seconds to achieve low latency and "impressive" data rates, according to a press release.
The invitation-only Brooklyn summit this year is giving special focus to spectrum assets above 60 GHz, progress in channel modeling at these higher frequencies and massive MIMO systems for 5G.
Last year, Nokia's demonstration of millimeter wave (mmW) technology to a select audience at the summit helped spur interest in mmW technology. While 5G standards have yet to be written, millimeter wave technology is expected to be part of 5G.
In the U.S., advocates say millimeter wave spectrum has the potential to unleash new businesses and use cases once the FCC makes it available.
Nokia's work on mmW is a combination of efforts in Finland and the U.S. "We believe there are a lot of use cases," Lauri Oksanen, vice president of research and technology at Nokia Networks, told FierceWirelessTech. "Certainly there will be possibilities for a lot of innovation when these high frequencies are opened up because there's so much spectrum to go around."
For Nokia, 5G is not just about millimeter wave; it is also about using more traditional frequencies. At the summit, Nokia is demonstrating how massive MIMO and beamsteering can be achieved with phased array technology using a number of antenna elements. Nokia says its use of the 3.5 GHz band, currently the highest cellular band in use, will demonstrate beamforming with the Mitsubishi Electric 3.5 GHz 2D Active Antenna connected to a Nokia Flexi Base station as a transmitter.
But the company is putting a lot of effort into researching millimeter wave because "this is the difficult part of the new technology," the kind of territory where no man has gone before, Oksanen said. "This is where we really need to do the research early on. The other parts of the technology and the lower frequency spectrum is more like business as usual."
If you would have asked engineers in the field just five years ago if they thought it were possible to build a mobile system with the millimeter wave frequencies, "pretty much everybody would have said 'no way that's possible.' It turns out that it looks very much like it's quite possible," he said.
Nokia's 10 Gbps demonstration with NI is designed to show that extremely fast broadband speeds will offer users enough capacity wherever they go to perform every function they want without a drop in speed or connection, regardless of how many people are connected at the same time.
Users, for example, will have the ability to download a full-length HD movie to their phone in a matter of seconds rather than minutes. Video chats will be "so immersive that users will feel like they can reach out and touch the other person right through the screen," according to the press release. 8K quality films in 3D will be available for view--which is 16 times the pixel count of full HD.
Nokia is using NI's software development platform in its demonstrations. NI says its software-defined platform based on LabView and PXI is ideal for researching and prototyping cutting-edge technology like what Nokia is doing with 10 Gbps data rates in the mmWave spectrum.
For more:
- see the press release
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