Today, Telus and Huawei announced that they have successfully achieved 5G wireless speeds exceeding 1 Gbps in its TechCity 5G Living Lab in Vancouver.
This advanced form of LTE will continue to evolve as carriers and device manufacturers prepare for the 2019 launch of commercial 5G wireless networks.
It should be noted that even though in testing the company was able to hit 1Gbps speeds, it does not mean this is the speeds consumers will see in actual usage. Wireless connections are affected by a number of variables, including network congestion, signal quality, and physical obstacles.
Telus says the deployment will let customers seamlessly move between indoor and outdoor locations without noticing a change in network quality.
In its outdoor environment, Telus says it obtained its gigabit LTE speeds through the use of 5-channel carrier aggregation, a 4×4 MIMO radio and using 256 QAM modulation. On the other hand, within its indoors environment, Telus used Huawei’s LampSite small-cell system for large to medium-sized sites like office buildings and sports stadiums. Small cells refer to cellular radio access nodes that operate in licensed and unlicensed spectrum and have a range of 10 meters to a few kilometers.
In a statement, Telus’ CTO Ibrahim Gedeon said:
“TELUS is committed to offering our customers ultra-fast, reliable and innovative mobile services. Achieving seamless outdoor-indoor access helps us build the foundation of next-generation networks that meet our customers’ ever-increasing need for wireless data. As we enhance our network capabilities on the journey to 5G, TELUS’ aggressive network investments are laying the groundwork for Canada’s fast, agile and intelligent wireless networks of the future.”
In a statement, President of Huawei Small Cell Product Line Ritchie Peng said:
“We are delighted that TELUS continues to deploy Huawei’s innovative small-cell solutions to support their heterogeneous network and achieve data rates exceeding 1 Gbps with the Huawei LampSite solution. With data rates exceeding 1 Gbps with Huawei’s LampSite Solution, TELUS customers can experience these speeds everywhere thanks to the collaboration and experiential learning in the TELUS ‘TechCity 5G Living Lab’.”
Telus competitors Bell and Rogers have also made recent expansions to their LTE-Advanced networks.
