After Huawei and Vodafone conducted 5G trials in Italy, the two have now successfully achieved their first 5G data connection. Vodafone and Huawei made available a radio base station using Massive MIMO technology.
These trials were promoted by the Ministry for Economic Development in Milan. Vodafone was selected to conduct these 5G trials on frequencies in the 3.7-3.8GHz portion of spectrum that was made available by the Ministry. However, this was still done a little old school way with connections being achieved using an antenna located at the Vodafone Village in Milan, marking the start of the planned network rollout.
This was a real live test demonstrating use of 5G Prototype equipment that already meets the current 3GPP standard, including Massive MIMO technology, which increases both capacity and coverage. Vodafone says, during the test, it was possible to appreciate the performance of the 5G network, reaching download speeds of more than 2.7GB per second, with a latency of just over a millisecond.
While Vodafone has tested its first 5G connection, and Indians are still grappling with a decent 4G connection, the Indian government too has been planning to pave way for 5G. Currently, the minimum-mandated internet speed in the country is just 512Kbps, which is far lesser than global speeds which float around 50-70Mbps. In order to boost the internet speed on mobile and broadband networks, the government is looking at increasing the mandatory speed to at least 2Mbps and more.
Meanwhile, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) said in its ‘Consultation Paper on Data Speed Under Wireless Broadband Plans’ that incumbent telecom operators are averse to the idea of having a higher threshold for internet speeds, owing to a range of concerns. These include low coverage zones, high rise buildings, external factors such as device quality, peak time, transmission bandwidth, and website behavior among others.
