Singtel, Ericsson testing Massive MIMO, Cloud RAN in drive towards 5G

Singaporean operator Singtel and Ericsson are working together to trial Massive MIMO and Cloud RAN – both key components in 5G evolution – on Singtel’s 4G LTE network, a press release from the Swedish vendor disclosed. The Ericsson AIR 6468 radio system, providing 64T64R Massive MIMO capabilities (combining MIMO with beamforming on advanced antennas to boost capacity and coverage) will be tested and ‘progressively deployed’ alongside a joint trial of Cloud RAN which the release says will provide Singtel with ‘the flexibility to centralise, distribute, scale and virtualise radio access network functions to efficiently meet performance requirements today and on the road to 5G’. Ericsson and Singtel first signed a 5G Memorandum of Understanding in January 2015 and claimed to be the first to showcase a 5G system in Southeast Asia in August 2016, achieving a downlink speed of 27.5Gbps.