5G: Huawei and Vodafone test high and low frequency bands in urban city

[Frankfurt, Germany, Oct. 13th, 2016] Huawei announces that working with Vodafone it has successfully tested 5G mobile connectivity using high and low frequency bands. The companies demonstrated 1.5 kilometers cell coverage in the lower C-Band and 5Gbps peak throughput for a single user in the high band. It is the world’s first 5G large scale mobility field test of macro coverage in dense urban city scenarios.

The support of mobility capability plays a key role in the adoption of 5G applications such as AR/VR etc. It is believed that these applications could require more than 100Mbps average data rate and gigabit speeds for multiusers in hotspot areas. Performance achieved in this realistic environment study is an important reference for the NGMN and European trial initiatives to develop and verify solutions for future 5G commercial launch plan.

5G will be the next generation of mobile technology formally defined in 2020. Huawei and Vodafone have signed the 5G strategic MoU in 2015 and the 5G Technologies Acceleration MoU in 2016. In the joint research of 5G New Radio (NR) candidate technologies, it is demonstrated that Filtered-OFDM, Sparse Coding Multiple Access (SCMA) and Polar Code works stably with the massive Multi-User MIMO(MU-MIMO) technology, and the spectrum efficiency improves approximately three times in comparison with LTE. According to the field test, the peak cell throughput of 18Gbps under 200MHz bandwidth in the Sub6GHz band, and air interface latency of 0.5ms in the 5G New Radio user plane were achieved.

Yang Chaobin, President of Huawei 5G Product Line, said:

"Huawei and Vodafone are strategic partners and we are now expanding our collaboration. As a leading operator in Europe and many other regions of the world, Vodafone has played a leading role in driving innovation. I am confident that the breakthrough we achieved today is just the beginning, and we expect more exciting results in future. "

Luke Ibbetson, Head of Vodafone Group R&D, 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. We look forward to continuing our collaboration with Huawei to test and evaluate emerging 5G technologies.”