Page 85 - SAMENA Trends - May 2020

TECHNOLOGY UPDATES SAMENA TRENDS

T-Mobile Delivers Gigabit 5G Speeds Using Mid-Band Spectrum

T-Mobile achieved a significant milestone
in New York, passing the gigabit speed
threshold with mid-band 5G. This is
significant because, generally, high-band
mmWave is viewed as the flavor of 5G
that offers the best speeds. Unfortunately,
mmWave has notoriously short range,
requiring towers, repeaters or base
stations every couple of hundred meters.
This makes it logistically impossible to
widely deploy it across the country. In
contrast, low-band 5G has the best range
and penetration, even better than 4G LTE in
some cases, but offers only modest speed
improvements over the older technology.
Mid-band spectrum, in the 2.5GHz range, is
generally considered the sweet spot for 5G,
offering the best blend of range, penetration
and speed. According to Ookla Speedtest’s
Milan Milanovic, however, T-Mobile’s mid-
band may be giving mmWave a run for its
money. The mid-band spectrum was one
of the primary reasons T-Mobile worked so years, but had never been able to deploy it and customers alike.
hard to merge with Sprint. Sprint had been to maximum benefit. It appears T-Mobile’s
sitting on a wealth of the spectrum for investment is paying off for the company

Nokia, KDDI Develop PoC on Fully Virtualized Cloud RAN to Support 5G

Nokia and KDDI (au) have embarked on a
joint initiative aimed at delivering a fully
virtualized Cloud RAN solution. In a press
release the Finnish vendor confirmed
the start of a lab-based proof of concept
(PoC), using its AirScale All-in-Cloud BTS
solution, to enable the Japanese cellco
to research ‘how flexible, virtualized
radio network technology can support
the diversifying network performance
requirements in the 5G era’. Nokia claims
its AirScale All-in-Cloud BTS is a ‘fully
cloudified 5G BTS, placing both the real-
time and non-real-time baseband in
the cloud’. With KDDI having launched
commercial 5G services in March 2020,
the PoC will be used to provide a flexible
network configuration of a base station
virtualization as KDDI strives to implement
an ‘optimal’ 5G network. The statement
also noted that the Japanese carrier has also been working closely with Nokia on 5G core standalone network trials.

85 MAY 2020