Australia’s second-largest telco, Optus, and Chinese technology company, Huawei, have taken a step forward in their 5G partnership, conducting a local Australian trial that clocked up single user transmission speeds of 35 Gbps.
The trial, conducted in Sydney, was a local initiative undertaken as part of a 5G collaboration agreement between Optus’ parent company, Singtel, and Huawei, aimed at utilising technologies such as millimetre wave and Polar code.
The companies claim the trial demonstrated the fastest speeds of a single user transmission over 5G in Australia to date.
The objective of the trial, which was conducted over the 73 GHz band, was to explore spectrum efficiency at millimetre wave frequencies - above 30GHz - which Optus claims are “key to realising the promise” of 5G networks.
“The possibilities with 5G are endless. Through our strategic partnership with Huawei we are undertaking the necessary preparation, testing and trials to tackle the 5G opportunity head on,” said Optus Networks acting managing director, Dennis Wong.
For Huawei’s carrier business group managing director, Yan Jun, the trial represents a significant step forward for the two companies and their 5G agreement.
The companies have collaborated on other projects. In October 2016, Optus implemented cloud baseband technology with Huawei, which pushed peak speeds through inter-site carrier aggregation at the AFL Grand Final.
Looking forward, Optus plans to deploy Coordinated Heterogeneous Network and trial Massive MIMO multiple antenna technology next year.
The latest 5G trial with Huawei follows an agreement inked between Optus and Nokia to trial 5G network technology on the telco’s 3500 MHz spectrum. Terms of that deal will see Optus and Nokia undertake an early 5G prototype in Optus’s band in Australia by 2017.
Optus is just one of the Australian mobile network carriers currently in the process of undertaking 5G trials, with Vodafone seeing speeds of 5Gbps over 200 MHz of spectrum in its first local live public trial of the technology in early October, undertaken in partnership with Nokia.
Meanwhile, in September, Telstra and Ericsson tested what the telco claims was one of the world’s first 5G radio test beds in Melbourne, using 800MHz of spectrum. Those tests revealed speeds to two mobile devices of more than 20Gbps.
