Samsung recently announced that it has successfully demonstrated 5G standalone (SA) dual connectivity that aggregated mmWave and mid-band spectrum to reach speeds of 8.08Gbps.
Conducted in Samsung’s Plano, Texas lab, it resulted in the fastest downlink speeds recorded using a single user device. New Radio Dual Connectivity (NR-DC) technology was used to combine 800MHz of 5G mmWave spectrum and 100MHz of mid-band spectrum.
Samsung solutions included its fully-virtualized RAN and Core, mmWave 5G Compact Macro and Massive MIMO radio, featuring 256 Quadrature Amplitude Modulation (QAM) technology for enhanced performance. Using 256 QAM boosted downlink speeds by more than 30 percent compared to 64QAM. The smartphone form-factor test device used was powered by Snapdragon® X65 5G Modem-RF System.
With this test, Samsung and its collaboration partners closed out last year with important progress made in both 5G download and upload speeds. Today’s news follows the companies’ prior announcement in October, where we reached a milestone in 5G uplink speeds, achieving 711Mbps in a lab trial using aggregated bands of mmWave spectrum. This progress opens up new possibilities for 5G use cases 2022.
Upload and download speeds are beginning to have real-world impacts on both consumer and business experiences, as higher speeds open up new possibilities. Conducting tests that explore 5G speed-enhancing technologies are important for evolving the technology and experiences.
Farook Hussan, Senior Director of Technology, Networks Business, Samsung Electronics America
Combining the C-Band and mmWave spectrum using NR-DC aggregation has allowed us to expand the possibilities of 5G’s potential to the end user. Our earlier trial reached a new milestone for uplink speeds, and now, with this new achievement in hitting 8Gbps+ download speeds, Samsung is excited to help mobile operators and enterprises pave the way towards next generation use cases leveraging AR/VR, enhanced video, analytics and other high capacity applications.
