MTS, a major telco in Russia and the CIS serving over 100 million subscribers, and Ericsson announced that during trials of 5G technology they achieved claimed record data transmission rates of up to 25 Gbit/s using a portable prototype of a smartphone, representing an advance on previous 5G trials that involved only stationary devices.
The testing was conducted by Ericsson and MTS at the Opening Arena stadium in Moscow, where a base station operating in the range of 14.5 to 15.3 GHz transmitted a signal to a portable prototype of a subscriber’ device at the speeds of up to 25 Gbit/s. During the trials, MTS and Ericsson tested 5G technology in a range of scenarios requiring high bandwidth and low latency, such as 4K video streaming, virtual reality services and remote robot control over a mobile network.
The latest trials featured technologies including:
1. Multi-user and massive MIMO with an array of transmit-receive antennas, including serving multiple subscribers in one sector of a cell over the same frequency band.
2. Beam tracking, designed to provide user devices with a stable, reliable connection and the optimum throughput performance when on the move.
3. Dynamic TDD, which enhances the data transfer rate and efficiency of wireless network resource utilisation by dynamically redistributing the bandwidth when transmitting traffic in the downlink and upstream channels.
Ericsson noted that the trials were conducted as part of its strategic partnership with MTS established in December 2015. Under the agreement, Ericsson and MTS planned to cooperate on 5G R&D in Russia, encompassing areas including spectrum studies of the next generation network and implementation of a test system.
Subsequently, in June 2016 the companies tested LTE-U (LTE-Unlicensed), demonstrating the aggregation of two frequency bands, 10 MHz in the 1800 MHz band of LTE and 20 MHz in the unlicensed 5 GHz band at WiFi access points, demonstrating data rates of 200 Mbit/s.
Also in June last year, the companies signed a 3 year agreement for the supply of software for the modernisation of the MTS network, to include implementing IoT technology and testing extended GSM technology (EC-GSM-IoT).
