Indian telecom operator Bharti Airtel and Huawei have conducted India’s first 5G network trial under a test set up.
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This is the first 5G trial in India. This is a major achievement for Huawei that competes with Ericsson, Nokia and ZTE in India to grab 5G network deals in India.
Airtel, the leading telecom operator in India, has taken the lead in 5G with the first 5G trials. Telecom operators such as Vodafone, Idea Cellular, Reliance Jio and BSNL are yet to make announcement on 5G trials in the country with 1 billion plus phone subscriptions. BSNL has a tie-up with Nokia for 5G exploration. But BSNL is currently in the process of launching its 4G network.
Airtel has conducted the 5G trial at Airtel’s network experience centre in Manesar (Gurgaon), India. The setup included 5G RAN operating on 3.5 GHz band, 5G Core and 50GE Network Slicing router.
Airtel achieved a user throughput of more than 3 Gbps during the 5G test trial. Huawei said this is the highest measured throughput for a mobile network in 3.5 GHz band with 100MHz bandwidth and end-to-end network latency of approximately 1 msec.
The setup demonstrates high spectral efficiency and 5G mobile technology’s power to deliver services such as IoT and AR/VR.
“We’re moving quickly to begin collaboration towards 5G interoperability and development testing (IODT) based on the 3GPP R15 standards. We look forward to work closely with our partners for developing a robust 5G ecosystem in India,” Abhay Savargaonkar, director – Networks, Bharti Airtel, said.
5G R15 is focusing on eMBB, laying the key building blocks to support services like virtual reality, ultra high definition immersive video and diversified long tail of future use cases and innovations. 3GPP completed the first drop of 5G New Radio (NR) standards in December 2017, said Emmanuel Coelho Alves, director, Wireless Marketing, Huawei HQ.
