Huawei’s latest 5G test in Italy surpassed a net throughput of 3Gbps, the Chinese tech giant said Thursday. The company’s historic experiment was organized in partnership with TIM and Fastweb, having managed to reach a record throughput despite the experimental setup using only 100MHz of bandwidth, which Huawei highlights as a major achievement and one that has the potential to reimagine the concept of cellular service delivery in urban areas due to the efficient manner in which it managed to provide an ultra-high connection speed and low latency to testers.
The trio’s experiment took place in a Turin-based lab and utilized solutions compliant with the first implementable 5G standard the 3GPP completed in late December, paving the way for new R&D efforts meant to accelerate 5G commercialization. Huawei has been quick to embrace the new specification as part of its experiments, with its latest attempt to do so delivering a spectral efficiency that’s approximately seven times higher than that of even the best 4G tech, amounting to (30 b/s)/Hz. In other words, Huawei’s experimental platform isn’t just faster and more responsive but uses seven times less bandwidth than even the most efficient 4G-based implementations. The end-to-end setup was transporting every bit of data in 2.6 milliseconds, thus being ten times faster than any commercially available 4G solution. The Chinese original equipment manufacturer is planning to continue exploring the technology used in the trial and will launch its first cell site based on such a configuration by spring.
Huawei isn’t the only Chinese company that’s been pursuing 5G projects in Italy, with ZTE recently agreeing to a partnership with Rome meant to accelerate the city’s adoption of the fifth generation of mobile networks as part of its pledge to invest half a billion euros ($611 million) in the country. Both firms and other 5G pioneers have been conducting wireless research and development across the globe, from the Far East and Europe to North America. Huawei’s experimental 5G technologies most recently made their way to some Canadians’ living rooms, whereas the industry as a whole is expected to start commercial 5G deployment in late 2018 before transitioning to large-scale buildouts early next year.