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China Mobile has completed device and infrastructure interoperability testing with Huawei and Intel ahead of the operator's plans to rollout standards-based 5G in China.
China Mobile Communications Corp. has said that it uses the most recent 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) 5G standalone (5G SA) standard on the mainland by 2020. The standalone spec doesn't require 4G LTE as a control plane to start and end 5G data sessions, unlike the earlier non-standalone spec. China Mobile has also promised to deploy 10,000 5G base stations by 2020. (See China Mobile to Deploy 10,000 5G Basestations by 2020 and China Mobile Confirms Aggressive 5G Standalone Plan.)
The operators and the vendors undertook the 3GPP 5G New Radio interoperability testing on the C-Band, which some observers are hoping will become a global mid-frequency 5G standard and is already such in China and Europe in the 3.5GHz tranche of the spectrum. The C-band encompasses 3.3GHz to 4.2GHz and 4.4GHz to 5GHz. (See South Korea's 5G Auction Raises $3.3B and FCC Mulls Opening Up 4.9GHz for 5G, Robots & Drones.)
Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd. provided multi-antenna (64 transmitters and 64 receivers) networking equipment for the test. Intel Corp. (Nasdaq: INTC) had some 2 transmitter/2 receiver user test devices on hand.
— Dan Jones, Mobile Editor, Light Reading
This is an edited version of a story that was originally published on Telco Transformation's sister site, Light Reading. To see the full story, click here.
