Another day, another important 5G milestone: This time it's happening over in Germany where Deutsche Telekom has demonstrated standards-based 5G interoperability on a commercial basestation with partners Intel and Huawei.
The trio showed interoperability and development testing (IODT) based on the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) R15 standard with a commercial Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd. basestation and Intel Corp. (Nasdaq: INTC)'s third-generation 5G NR Mobile Trial Platform in Deutsche Telekom AG (NYSE: DT)'s Bonn, Germany labs this week. The successful trial builds on one first conducted in Huawei's Shanghai labs based on the first 5G NR interoperability. (See Deutsche Telekom, Intel, Huawei Claim 5G NR Interop Success.)
The German operator has been working with Huawei since 2015 on 5G network research and is working towards launching full commercial 5G equipment next year. Its goal with the interoperability trial was to validate the elements of the new standard, ratified by the 3GPP in December, including synchronization, coding, frame structure and the numerology components that let NR-compliant devices connect to the 5G network. (See Get Ready for 5G 'Phase II'.)
Deutsche Telekom says this trial was based on the largest C-band cell bandwidth defined by the 5G NR standard -- 100MHz of spectrum in the 3.5GHz band -- and incorporated the latest Massive MIMO multi-antenna and beamforming technology enabled by the standard framework. (See Huawei Preps for a Massive (MIMO) MWC .)
— Sarah Thomas, Contributing Editor, Telco Transformation