Huawei, Airtel conduct first ever 5G trial in India

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hina’s leading smartphone maker Huawei has joined hands with telecom major to announce a successful testing of 5G network trial under a test set-up in India. The trial was conducted at Airtel’s Network Experience Centre in Manesar in Gurugram.

During the test trial, a user throughput of more than 3 Gbps was achieved using the setup. This is the highest measured throughput for a mobile network in 3.5 GHz band with 100MHz bandwidth and end-to-end network latency of approximately 1 msec.

“This is small but a very significant step in our journey towards 5G. The promise of 5G is endless, it will be a game changer and, it will change the way we live, work and engage. We’re moving quickly to begin collaboration towards 5G interoperability and development testing (IODT) based on the 3GPP R15 standards. We look forward to work closely with our partners for developing a robust 5G ecosystem in India,” said Abhay Savargaonkar, Director-Networks, Bharti Airtel.

The test setup demonstrated high-spectral efficiency and potential for diversified services such as Internet of Things (IoT) and Augmented Reality/Virtual Reality (AR/VR) that can be delivered by 5G technology to serve a digitally connected world.

“We have been focusing on developing 5G ecosystem and use cases and the show with Bharti Airtel impressively demonstrates the performance capability of 5G in 3.5 GHz band,” said Emmanuel Coelho Alves, Director, Wireless Marketing, Huawei HQ.

Airtel has also partnered with Ericsson for deploying 5G technology in India. Under the partnership, Ericsson will work with Airtel to create a strategic roadmap to help the telco upgrade its network to next-gen’s 5G network. Apart from Ericsson and Huawei, Airtel has also partnered with Nokia for 5G technology.
With 5G services, Airtel aims to take on Jio that has already stirred the 4G market and is in talks with Samsung to roll out 5G services in India.