Airtel and Huawei conduct India’s first 5G trial

India's largest telecom operator Bharti Airtel and Huawei have conducted India's first 5G network trial set up at the telco's Network Experience Centre in Manesar (Gurgaon) on Friday.

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The setup included 5G RAN operating on 3.5 GHz band, 5G Core and 50GE Network Slicing router.

Abhay Savargaonkar, Director - Networks, Bharti Airtel said, "This is small but a very significant step in our journey towards 5G. The promise of 5G is endless, it will be a game changer and, it will change the way we live, work and engage. We're moving quickly to begin collaboration towards 5G interoperability and development testing (IODT) based on the 3GPP R15 standards. We look forward to working closely with our partners for developing a robust 5G ecosystem in India."

5G R15 is focusing on eMBB, laying the key building blocks to support services like virtual reality, ultra high definition immersive video and diversified long tail of future use cases and innovations. 3GPP completed the first drop of 5G New Radio (NR) standards in December 2017.

"We have been focusing on developing the 5G ecosystem and use cases, and the show with Bharti Airtel impressively demonstrates the performance capability of 5G in 3.5 GHz band. We shall also continue to work with Vertical Industry players to develop wider ecosystem use cases beyond enhanced mobile broadband," says Emmanuel Coelho Alves, Director, Wireless Marketing, Huawei HQ.

During the test trial, a user throughput of more than 3 Gbps was achieved using the setup. This is the highest measured throughput for a mobile network in 3.5 GHz band with 100MHz bandwidth and end-to-end network latency of approximately 1 msec.

The setup demonstrates high spectral efficiency and potential for diversified services such as IoT and AR/VR, which can be delivered by 5G technology to serve a digitally connected world.

To recall Vodafone and Huawei have also completed lab tests which indicate that traditional IP microwave links will be considered a viable technology for 5G backhaul.

The tests showed that it is possible to deliver up to 2.7 Gigabits per second (Gbps) capacity from a single IP microwave link, aggregating 2x112 MHz channels in a single vertical or horizontal polarisation. It is the first time that a single radio frequency (RF) outdoor unit has been capable of reaching over 2 Gbps in a single polarisation.

Enhancements made by Huawei engineers to the modem and RF unit enabled the testing team to achieve the latency of as little as 50 microseconds.