Singapore fixed and mobile operator M1 and Chinese equipment maker Huawei say they will continue joint tests of 5G technology for the remainder of this year, including working to complete an end-to-end live broadcast of virtual reality content over a next generation mobile network. The joint trial will use the 28GHz millimetre-wave (mmWave) spectrum band, the pair said, and will take place at the end of this month in M1’s MiWorld building in Jurong, in what they claim will be the first live end-to-end 5G trial of Huawei’s equipment in the city-state in the 28GHz band.
Furthermore, Huawei and M1 say they are planning to conduct a non-standalone 5G field trial by the end of 2018 using the 3.5GHz band, and then a standalone 3GPP standards-compliant trial using both 28GHz and 3.5GHz bands in mid-2019. Previously, the two companies claimed to have attained speeds of 35Gbps during a trial of 5G network technology in January 2017, at that time using mmWave spectrum in the 73GHz E-band. As another strand, M1 and Huawei say they have also been working together on improving 4G speeds since the start of 2016, reportedly attaining 1Gbps/130Mbps download/upload speeds across M1’s 4G mobile network using a CAT14 Huawei device for the trial. The 4G trial was also conducted within the confines of M1’s LTE-A test facility, using a combination of four network technologies: 4×4 Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO); two-component carrier (2CC) uplink carrier aggregation; tri-band downlink carrier aggregation (3CC); and Higher Order Modulation 256 Quadrature Amplitude Modulation (256 QAM).