Nokia on Friday announced that it has successfully completed a series of Over-the-Air (OTA) 5G NR (new radio) trials in C-band spectrum, in Dallas, Texas.
The drive tests, which achieved stable peak throughput speeds of over 1 Gbps, confirmed that Nokia’s solution is ready for commercial deployment ahead of the U.S. C-band spectrum auction in December. The C-band, between 3.4 GHz and 4.2 GHz, is a crucial resource for operators to offer the best mix of 5G network capacity and coverage to subscribers across the U.S.
The demonstration was performed in Dallas’ Cypress Waters neighborhood using Nokia’s AirScale 5G base station equipment that is an industry-leading, commercial end-to-end 5G solution enabling operators globally to capitalize on all their 5G spectrum assets (from 600MHz to 39GHz). It offers huge capacity scaling and market-leading latency and connectivity by enabling all air-interface technologies on the same radio access equipment. The setup utilized 100 MHz of spectrum at 3.75 GHz with a 4x4 MIMO and configuration in Non-Standalone (NSA) mode combined with Nokia’s Core network. During drive testing, Nokia monitored network performance and demonstrated that the ‘handovers’ successfully happened between C-Band base stations as expected.
The U.S. will hold a spectrum auction for the C-band in December with network deployments expected in the first half of 2021. C-band spectrum will be prime spectrum for providing leading-edge 5G services in the U.S., especially when combined with already deployed network infrastructure and spectrum bands via TDD/FDD Carrier Aggregation and other interworking features, said Nokia.
Nokia’s C-band solution is based on its AirScale 5G radio frequency (RF) products.
