Deutsche Telekom on September 1 said its telecom network in Germany is 5G ready — powered by Huawei user equipment using 3GPP specifications for 5G New Radio (NR).

DT’s commercial network in central Berlin has gone live with a 5G connection at over two gigabit per second and a low latency of three milliseconds over a 3.7 gigahertz spectrum link.

“5G new radio will be critical for meeting our customers’ ever-increasing connectivity requirements that are steadily growing with more and more network connections,” said Claudia Nemat, Deutsche Telekom Board member for Technology and Innovation.

“These achievements highlight capabilities of the 5G NR equipment to meet operators’ requirements for addressing new business opportunities for end users,” said Huimin Zhu, vice president 5G Huawei.

Deutsche Telekom can prepare the commercial launch of 5G NR services in Europe by 2020 thanks to 3GPP standardization efforts.

The Non-Standalone 5G NR mode for the enhanced Mobile Broadband (eMBB) use-case meant that the connection is anchored in LTE while 5G NR carriers are used to boost data-rates and reduce latency.

Therefore, 5G new radio will be deployed with the evolution of 4G LTE as the baseline for wide-area broadband coverage. The specifications enabling that system will be complete by December 2017 as part of the first drop of 3GPP Release 15.

5G New Radio has characteristics that make it ideal to meet the sub 6Ghz mid-band needs for 5G applications that will require mobility support, wide-area coverage, as well as multi-gigabit throughput speeds and millisecond low latency.