Deutsche Telekom has joined forces with Huawei to deploy Europe’s first commercially available network built largely around the technology expected to become the final 5G standard.
Although the 5G standard has not been formally ratified, the 3GPP standards organization announced it would accelerate its timeline, locking down the first specifications in December. That decision means the industry has reached a stage where major changes are unlikely, enabling equipment vendors to begin producing standardized 5G hardware. Some operators now anticipate launching standards-based 5G services as early as 2019.
Huawei and Deutsche Telekom describe their implementation as “pre-5G,” but the underlying technologies closely mirror the capabilities planned for the final releases of 5G.
“5G New Radio will be critical for meeting our customers’ ever-growing connectivity needs as the number of connected devices continues to increase,” said Claudia Nemat, Deutsche Telekom board member responsible for technology and innovation. “This achievement shows the feasibility of our plans to deliver a superior, new customer experience.”
5G performance
Deutsche Telekom’s pre-5G network is now active in central Berlin, delivering downstream speeds exceeding 2 Gbit/s and measured latency as low as three milliseconds using spectrum in the 3.7 GHz band.
These results notably surpass the most advanced 4G networks. Leading 4G deployments are moving toward gigabit-class peak rates, which are less than half of the 2 Gbit/s observed here. In terms of latency, top-performing 4G networks typically show average round-trip times significantly higher than the single-digit milliseconds demonstrated in this trial.
Huawei’s long-term vision for 5G includes support for massive numbers of connections, extremely low latency, and very high throughput. The company has described ambitions such as supporting billions of connected devices, 1 ms latency in ideal conditions, and multi-gigabit — even tens of gigabits — per-second aggregate throughput in some scenarios.
“These achievements highlight the capabilities of 5G NR equipment to meet operators’ requirements and to enable new business opportunities for end users,” said Huimin Zhu, Huawei vice president for 5G. “Huawei is confident that the partnership with Deutsche Telekom will help prepare for a commercial launch of 5G NR services in Europe by 2020, supported by 3GPP standardization efforts.”
It is important to note that performance will vary once 5G is widely deployed. Although this trial was carried out in a live urban environment, it still relies on a pre-standard implementation. Real-world deployments will face different conditions, and as more devices — including many IoT sensors and consumer handsets — begin to use 5G networks, overall performance characteristics will change.
“With this real-world achievement, Deutsche Telekom is taking an important first step toward launching a 5G network,” said Bruno Jacobfeuerborn, Deutsche Telekom’s chief technology officer. “When the standard is finalized, we plan to run trials in 2018 to lay the groundwork for broader deployment of commercial sites and to support device availability for the mass market as products become available.”
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