Network maker Nokia today said it is the first company to run 5G technology on a commercially available telecom base station — at the Mobile World Congress (MWC 2016).
At the MWC 2016, Nokia demonstrated use cases such as interactive Virtual Reality on its commercial, 5G-ready AirScale radio access technology.
Nokia said its 5G access system enable telecoms to deliver more than 20Gbps.
Espoo, Finland-based Nokia said its AirScale radio can support 5G technologies to give operators the confidence that their hardware investments today will meet future demands. This is the first time 5G radio access is being demonstrated on commercial hardware. Operators will be able to launch 5G earlier and at lower cost, and migrate their existing LTE infrastructure to early 5G services in 2017, with full 5G commercial services expected in 2020.
Nokia is showing how operators can test 5G use cases in their networks using all spectrum bands, including sub-6 GHz for wide area coverage and early market entry, with cmWave and mmWave providing very high communications capacity.
Such early testing ahead of full 5G standards, currently being devised by various standards bodies with the aim of having them in place by 2020, will help ensure that subscribers get superior and consistent performance of 5G from day one.
Nokia and 5G
Nokia is showcasing pre-standard 5G radio on Nokia AirScale Base Station and AirScale Cloud Base Station Server running on Nokia AirFrame IT hardware. The system uses 8×8 MIMO and an optimized frame structure that cuts latency below 1 millisecond.
The company is also showcasing a sensitivity receiver for mmWave that opens up the use of 64QAM with 2×2 MIMO, enabling multi-Gbps speed. Though mmWave are expected to be standardized in 3GPP by 2019, Nokia’s pre-standard system provides hands-on experience of how to build the final commercial solution.
Hossein Moiin, CTO of Nokia Mobile Networks, said: “This is the industry’s first demonstration of how 5G will work in practice, going beyond previous experimental systems. We are showing 5G live on our commercial AirScale radio access product.”
