Successful 5G pilot places Canada at the forefront of global wireless innovation

Huawei and TELUS deploy live 3GPP-oriented network at the “5G Living Lab”

Vancouver – TELUS, Canada's fastest growing telecommunications company, and Huawei, one of the world's largest information and communications technology companies, achieved a significant breakthrough with the successful completion of a 5G wireless connection using the global 3GPP technology standards platform. As operators and vendors race towards the global deployment of 5G, this successful pilot represents one of the most advanced connections yet made using technologies that will form the standard for global 5G.

The successful pilot not only demonstrates the dramatically faster wireless speeds customers will enjoy as 5G technology becomes mainstream over the next three years (which will be up to 200 times faster than current LTE networks), but it also showcases the potential for 5G technology to deliver Wireless-to-the-Premise (WTTx) connectivity with speeds and reliability necessary to power the smart homes and businesses of tomorrow.

The pilot network was set up to reflect a real-world point-to-multi-point connection over commercial central office equipment and transport networks. The network leveraged equipment based on 3GPP 5G foundational technologies over a 28 GHz connection, although the 5G standards body will not be finalized until early 2018.

“We are extremely proud that Canadian-led talent and expertise is at the forefront of global 5G research and technology deployment. This is an incredibly rewarding accomplishment for our joint TELUS and Huawei teams who have worked hard to bring truly state-of-the-art technologies to life,” said Eros Spadotto, Executive Vice-president of Technology Strategy. “These advancements will help TELUS drive industry partnerships, develop yet-to-be-invented 5G applications and advance the 5G ecosystem with the ultimate goal of enabling future capabilities that will dramatically improve the lives of Canadians in our ever-changing digital society.”

The pilot is part of TELUS and Huawei’s 5G Living Lab in Vancouver, where both companies have been trialling next-generation technologies since 2015, in a live real-world setting. The Living Lab is playing an important role in advancing global 5G development by making a number of significant technological breakthroughs. Last year it achieved blazing-fast speeds of 30 Gbps in a controlled environment and successfully deployed a Heterogeneous Network (HetNet) in Downtown Vancouver. This latest achievement demonstrates a real-world point-to-multi-point connection with the low latency and reliability needed to power the next generation of home services.

These ground-breaking trials are laying the foundation for 5G, which will enable the likes of driverless cars; smart cities; new innovations in healthcare; as well as yet-to-be-imagined applications, devices and services powered by astonishingly fast and reliable wireless connections.

“This achievement is an important step forward in aligning our research efforts in 3GPP 5G standard with the practical application for building and deploying 3GPP unified 5G networks around the world” said Dr. Wen Tong, Huawei Fellow, and CTO Huawei Wireless based at the Canada Research Centre in Ottawa. “For the past several years, our Canadian team has played a key global leadership role in 5G. To achieve this successful trial in Canada with a Canadian partner is a powerful reflection on Canada’s 5G innovation capabilities.”

5G wireless technology is expected to become commercially available beginning in 2020, however, TELUS customers living in the Vancouver area will have early access to some of the most cutting-edge wireless technologies in the world thanks to advancements made at the 5G Living Lab.