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Nokia has announced a new 5G speed world record, clocking in at almost 5Gbps over its network in Dallas, Texas.
Finnish telecoms firm Nokia has announced a new 5G speed world record on equipment recently deployed commercially in the US. The over-the-air (OTA) network test took place in Dallas, and reached speeds of 4.7Gbps.
The speed was achieved by combining eight 100MHz channels of millimetre wave spectrum on the 28GHz and 39GHz bands. This provided 800MHz of bandwidth and 40 MHz of LTE spectrum using the EN-DC functionality available on Nokia’s AirScale solution.
EN-DC allows for the end user to connect to both 5G and LTE networks simultaneously, combining the two speeds into one. Nokia said the speeds were achieved on both 5G cloud-based and classic baseband configurations.
“This is an important and significant milestone in the development of 5G services in the US, particularly at a time when connectivity and capacity is so crucial,” said Tommi Uitto, president of mobile networks at Nokia.
“We already supply our millimetre-wave radios to all of the major US carriers and we look forward to continuing to work closely with them moving forward.”
Race to the top
The rate at which world records are being broken is now measured in months rather than years. In February, Swedish telecoms giant Ericsson announced it had achieved what was then the world record speed of 4.3Gbps.
At the time, Ericsson said that such speeds would allow someone to download one hour of 4K quality video in just 14 seconds. In November last year, Huawei announced that a test network in Turkey achieved 5G speeds of 2.92Gbps.
As the 5G roll-out continues across the world, researchers are already working towards 6G. While still very much in early development, it’s envisioned that the future mobile internet standard would not rely on cells for configuration and topology. Rather, it would use millions of smaller devices – called access points – about the size of a Wi-Fi router to provide speeds that could eclipse Nokia’s latest world record.
