China Telecom has completed its first stand-alone 5G call, as the company showcases its 5G portfolio at Mobile World Congress in Shanghai.
China Telecom made the call using Ericsson’s 5G commercial base stations along with its newly launched stand-alone NR software and its 5G cloud core solution. The test took place in Hangzhou, over China Telecom’s pre-commercial 5G network, using a fully commercialised chipset based handset from MediaTek.
The test used spectrum in the 3.5GHz band and was based on the 3GPP specifications from December 2018.
In addition to the high download speeds already being experienced on non-stand-alone networks, stand-alone 5G will also deliver the ultra low latency required for applications such as autonomous vehicles, remote surgery and a whole range of Industry 4.0 solutions.
China Telecom plans to roll out 5G services in over 40 towns and cities across China, when it launches next generation mobile services in early 2020. Recent tests of its pre-commercial 5G network achieved download speeds of 1.4Gbps using ZTE’s Axon 10 handset.