Ericsson announced that it will be ready to support operators' requirements for 5G field trials as early as next year, with Japan’s NTT DoCoMo expected to take lead to trial its 5G equipment. The telecoms vendor is preparing for the introduction of the 5G Radio Prototypes, including Multi-user MIMO (MU-MIMO) and Beamforming units for live outdoor and indoor network environments.
Ericsson 5G Radio Prototypes leverage the technology innovations enabled by lab-testing and live outdoor and indoor testing from the initial phase of the Ericsson Radio Test Bed, already deployed in the US, Japan, Korea and Sweden. These Radio Prototypes can be deployed across multiple radio access sites and can be integrated with cloud-based network slicing to enable agility and differentiated services for consumers, enterprise and a wide array of industrial IoT applications, said Ericsson. The prototypes can be integrated with Ericsson's network functions virtualization (NFV) applications to enable network-wide slicing, addressing the diversity of 5G network use cases, added Ericsson.
Ericsson 5G radio prototypes include:
Multi-User MIMO, enabling Ericsson 5G Radio Prototypes to address many users with the same spectrum, in one sector of a site.
Beamforming, key to enabling the Ericsson 5G Radio Prototypes to support higher frequency bands, driving increased capacity and reduced energy consumption, in typical network environments.
Advanced antenna design incorporating 128 antenna elements and 64 radio chains in each Ericsson 5G Radio Prototype.
Seizo Onoe, EVP and CTO, NTT DOCOMO
We are pleased to take the next step toward testing in realistic network environment. Tokyo Olympics and Paralympics will be a great opportunity to propose many different use cases of 5G, which will be launched on 2020. We expect that this would lead to even further opportunities.
Arun Bansal, Senior Vice President and Head of Business Unit Radio, Ericsson
These new 5G Radio Prototypes are the size of a carry-on and weigh around 40 lbs. - less than 20 kg. As a leader in standardization, it's important for us to be able to contribute with hard data rather than just theoretical discussions.
