Vodafone Spain, in association with Chinese vendor Huawei, has installed what it claims is ‘one of the first 5G network nodes in the world’ at La Nave, an urban innovation space situated in Madrid. The deployment – which coincides with the third #Barbac0d1ng event – supported a number of demonstrations related to the potential impact of 5G.
As previously reported by TeleGeography’s CommsUpdate, in July this year Vodafone deployed 30 pre-commercial 5G-capable antennas across the cities of Madrid, Barcelona, Seville, Malaga, Bilbao and Valencia. The rollout, which was carried out in conjunction with Huawei, targeted downtown areas, technology parks and universities. The new network utilises the 3.7GHz band and supports download speeds of up to 2.2Gbps. Vodafone dominated the bidding at Spain’s 5G auction earlier that month, paying EUR198.1 million (USD230.9 million) for 18 5MHz blocks of spectrum in the 3.6GHz-3.8GHz band.