Airtel and Huawei conduct India’s first 5G trial

In a major milestone for Indian telecom, Bharti Airtel (“Airtel”) and Huawei announced that they have successfully conducted India’s first 5G network trial under a test set up.

The trial was conducted at Airtel’s state-of-the-art Network Experience Centre in Manesar (Gurgaon). The setup included 5G RAN operating on 3.5 GHz band, 5G Core and 50GE Network Slicing router.

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.

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