Telekom Austria Group has announced further progress towards its goal of implementing 5G mobile technology by 2020 via a demonstration by its subsidiary A1 Slovenija in Slovenia, Central Europe, which has demonstrated data transfer rates of up to 850 Mbit/s over what it believes is the fastest live LTE network currently operating in Europe.
The latest test was conducted in partnership with Nokia at the premises of A1 Slovenija in Ljubljana, where a maximum speed of 877.5 Mbit/s was achieved over the Slovenian A1 LTE network. The data rate was enabled through the implementation of multi-component downlink carrier aggregation functionality in the downlink.
To achieve the downlink throughput in a live network, rather than in a lab setting, a total of 55 MHz of the Slovenian A1 frequency spectrum was used, with 35 MHz on band 7 (2,600 MHz) and 20 MHz on band 3 (1,800 MHz). The frequency band 7 was additionally supported with 4 x 4 MIMO in the downlink, while 256QAM modulation coding was implemented on both frequencies, increasing the maximum peak data rate by an further 30%.
Telekom Austria stated that the enhanced utilisation of frequency spectrum in the A1 LTE network was achieved in cooperation with Nokia, its technology partner. As the next step toward delivering 5G, Telekom Austria Group has stated that it is aiming to increase the peak data rates at its subsidiaries by implementing further technical innovations such as massive MIMO, beam forming and beam steering.
Commenting on the latest test, Peter Wukowits, country senior officer and head of Central Europe at Nokia, said, “With this 4.5G Pro demonstration, utilizing Nokia’s 5G-ready AirScale platform, Nokia and A1 Slovenija reached a milestone towards 5G… speeds above 850 Mbit/s are approaching a gigabit society, where mobile networks will provide fibre-like speeds close to 1 Gbit/s”.
- In December 2016, A1 and Nokia announced that as part of the move towards 5G they had achieved a data rate of 513 Mbit/s over the A1 live network on a mobile router and 463 Mbit/s on a smartphone at Austria’s University of Klagenfurt. The trial involved 3 carrier aggregation with frequencies in the 2,600 MHz, 1,800 MHz and 800 MHz ranges, plus 256QAM modulation.
- Recently, also working with Nokia, Telekom Austria Group subsidiary A1, which serves the Austrian market, announced a demonstration carried out in the city of Vienna during which transmission rates of more than 10 Gbit/s were achieved over installed copper cable in its fixed line network.
- The fixed network transmission speed achieved with Nokia leveraged an advance in the existing copper-based G.fast technology, XG-FAST. The test specifically involved 30 metres of copper cable and test equipment supplied by Nokia Bell Labs, and demonstrated that the existing copper cables between the street or basement of a building to houses or apartments can potentially support speeds in excess of 10 Gbit/s.
