Asia continues to be one of the busiest areas of pre-5G deployment with new projects underway from DOCOMO in Japan and China Mobile.
Ericsson, NTT DOCOMO and Intel will build a trial 5G environment in central Tokyo during 2017, with the vendor equipment including radio, baseband, virtualised RAN and core network. Intel will provide its chipset in user devices, which will run on 28GHz spectrum.
The trials will explore use case applications and radio performance.
Arun Bansal, Head of Business Unit Network Products at Ericsson, said: “This trial will represent an important milestone in 2017, paving the way for commercial 5G networks. It represents a unique opportunity to test real-life 5G performance in commercial conditions in the centre of Tokyo, enabling evaluation of consumer use cases and industry applications.”
Seizo Onoe, Executive Vice President and Chief Technology Officer at NTT DOCOMO, added: “DOCOMO and Ericsson have been working together on joint 5G projects including outdoor trials, and this is a further development of our joint efforts. Adding Intel’s expertise, we will be on track to evaluate the feasibility of services that leverage 5G technologies together with ecosystem partner companies.”
Meanwhile, China Mobile trialled potential 5G technologies, such as spatial modulation and filter bank multicarrier, on 3.5GHz spectrum in a trial with Samsung.
Samsung said in a statement that it wanted to verify mmwave performance and frequency characteristics, such as mobility, peak throughput, and multi-user scheduling, as well as how mmwave can perform indoors and cope with penetration loss.
Asia has been setting the pace with regard to 5G research and development ahead of major sporting events taking place in the coming years.