MTN, Africa’s largest mobile operator this week completed the first live outdoor 5G trial in Africa using Huawei's recently-launched commercial 5G 28GHz mmWave CPE in a real-world environment in Hatfield, Pretoria.
The field trial demonstrated a 5G fixed-wireless access use cases with speeds of 520Mbps downlink and 77Mbps uplink using 100MHz in the 28GHz spectrum.
Launched at MWC 2018, HUAWEI 5G CPE uses its self-developed Balong 5G01 chipset – the world’s first commercial chipset supporting the 3GPP standard for 5G, with theoretical downlink speeds of up to 2.3Gbps.
Early this year, MTN and Ericsson completed an indoor trial for 5G where it achieved a throughput of more than 20Gbps with less than 5ms latency. The Operator tested a range of 5G use cases and applications in its Test Lab proof of concept at its head office in Johannesburg.
The use of millimeter-wave spectrum bands is one of the key 5G enabling technologies to deliver the required capacity and massive data rates required for 5G's enhanced mobile broadband use cases, said MTN.
Babak Fouladi, CTIO, MTN Group
These 5G trials provide us with an opportunity to future proof our network and prepare it for the evolution of these new generation networks. We have gleaned invaluable insights about the modifications that we need to do on our core, radio and transmission network from these pilots.
Giovanni Chiarelli, CTIO, MTN SA
We are heavily investing in 2G, 3G, 4G, that is our primary focus from a volume perspective. But as you know in order to be ready for the next generation we need to start preparation work a few years in advance, so we think that now is the right time to start this preparation, to better understand how the new technology in 5G can be applicable.