Vodafone Australia demos 5G speeds of 5Gbps with Nokia
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Vodafone Australia demos 5G speeds of 5Gbps with Nokia

Vodafone Australia and Nokia have demonstrated throughput speeds of up to 5Gbps in a public lab trial at the University of Technology Sydney.

The two companies claim it is the “first public showcase of 5G capabilities in Australia”. The demonstration used 8x8 Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) and 64 Quadrature Amplitude Modulation (QAM) technologies to attain average speeds of around 4.84Gbps, with latency of 2.8 milliseconds.

The trial was conducted across Vodafone’s 4.5GHz spectrum band with 200MHz of cell bandwidth, with the operator using two use cases to demonstrate 5G capabilities: virtual reality cameras and robotics.

The robotics demonstration was used to highlight the differences in latency between 4G and 5G, and involved three robots attempting to balance a ball on a shared tray controlled by an app running over Vodafone’s network.

Over 4G, the robots struggled with 75ms of latency, meaning balancing the balls became difficult. Over 5G, however, the latency was just 2ms and the robots achieved their goal much quicker, according to reports from the demonstration.

Jeff Owen, head of Wireless Strategy at Vodafone Hutchison Australia (VHA), called 5G a "technology enabler".

“[5G] will be accompanied by another four types of convergent technologies ... cloud computing, mobile edge computing, network function virtualisation, and network slicing,” Owen added.

“We will see the core part [of the network] decentralised and moved out towards the towers, and we will see the equipment in the mobile phone towers become increasingly centralised and in many ways be collocated with the core equipment.”


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