United Arab Emirates (UAE) telco Etisalat has conducted a live on-air trial of Massive MIMO technology with Ericsson as part of its preparations for the launch of 5G mobile services by the end of this year. The vendor says that the deployment of Massive MIMO technology enables the launch of its AIR 6468 5G NR-capable radio solution, an advanced antenna system which is part of the Ericsson Radio System. The trials were carried out at Dubai Marina, a dense, high-traffic urban environment which Ericsson says was ideal for evaluating the benefits of the new technology.
In May 2017 Ericsson and Etisalat completed a trial of 5G mobile technology with outdoor mobility. The pair said that the trial ‘demonstrated 5G capabilities in a real-world environment over a live network, including tests on speed, latency and beam steering’. The test used 800MHz of spectrum in the 15GHz band, achieving an aggregate site throughput of over 24Gbps.