Premiere: T-Mobile Polska launches 5G network in Warsaw

12-07-2018 Pia Hettinger

• T-Mobile lays the foundation for commercial 5G expansion in Poland
• First tests for business customers
• #5G_Lab shows possibilities of the future

T-Mobile CEO Andreas Maierhofer, Srini Gopalan, Deutsche Telekom Board member for Europe, the Polish Digital Minister Marek Zagórski and Deutsche Telekom CEO Tim Höttges (left to right) inaugurate the launch of Poland's first fully functional 5G network.

Deutsche Telekom subsidiary T-Mobile Polska lays the foundation for commercial 5G expansion in Poland: T-Mobile CEO Andreas Maierhofer today inaugurated the launch of Poland's first fully functional 5G network. He was accompanied by Polish Digital Minister Marek Zagórski, Deutsche Telekom CEO Tim Höttges and Srini Gopalan, Deutsche Telekom Board member for Europe. The project will start with four base stations based entirely on the future 5G standard 5G New Radio (5G NR): First, the center of the capital Warsaw will be covered, then T-Mobile will gradually expand the 5G network to other cities. Further planning will be based on licensing and frequency allocation by the Polish regulatory authorities.

First tests for business customers

"Today is a special day," says Höttges. "State-of-the-art telecommunications infrastructure is essential for every country in Europe. We are proud to be the first operator in Poland with a 5G network. This is the beginning of a new era". In particular, industry and logistics will benefit from 5G for a variety of applications. T-Mobile Polska has distributed the first devices that enable access to the 5G network to selected business customers and partners. This enables partners to test and further develop their own business solutions and products in the real 5G network today, so that they can later offer them on the mass market.

Applications of the future in the #5G_Lab

At the same time, the #5G_Lab in Warsaw opens its doors for visitors. Here, the mobile operator shows 5G applications and presents the possibilities of the future. Using the latest virtual and augmented reality solutions, visitors can experience 5G applications from the industrial, smart city and entertainment sectors up close and personal. Here, the special features of 5G also come into effect: data is transmitted much faster, response times are significantly shorter. And these network advantages can be used simultaneously by a much larger group within a mobile radio cell.

The technology behind it

The 5G network in the center of Warsaw uses commercial 5G technology from Huawei and will be integrated into the live network infrastructure. This means it interacts with T-Mobile's existing 4G technology. This enables connections and field tests of future 5G services under real conditions. The antennas currently use the 3.5 GHz spectrum as part of a test license. The 3 GHz band is considered one of the starting bands for 5G. The technology, the software used, and the terminals are based on the standards of the 3GPP (3rd Generation Partnership Project) for 5G New Radio in the non-standalone version. This 5G mobile component was standardized in December 2017. 5G NR is ideally suited to meet the demand in the mid band below 6 GHz for 5G applications. Core features in this range are wide coverage, multi-gigabit throughput speeds and low latencies of the order of a few milliseconds.

Advanced antenna techniques are used to increase capacity and data rates in 5G NR compared to 4G: Massive MIMO (Multiple Input, Multiple Output) greatly increases the number of antenna elements deployed at both the base station and in the subscriber device. The large numbers of antenna elements used in Massive MIMO 5G antennas – up to 64 per antenna – greatly improve coverage precision for each individual user. What's more, the use of multi-user beamforming technology in combination with Massive MIMO optimizes the data transmission to each user, thereby multiplying the efficiency of spectral use. The setup in Warsaw is analogous to that of the Berlin 5G cluster of Telekom in Germany. Deutsche Telekom had already shown Europe's first 5G data connection in the Berlin live network in May of this year.