Chinese telcos will carry out 5G trials in at least 16 cities across the Asian nation
The government of China has given the green light to Chinese telecom operators to test 5G technology in major cities across the country, local press reported.
Under this initiative, state-run telcos will begin setting up 5G networks in 16 cities to trial the technology.
China Mobile, the world’s largest mobile operator in terms of subscribers, plans to carry out external field test in the cities of Hangzhou, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Suzhou, and Wuhan. To achieve this, the operator expects to deploy over 100 base stations in these locations.
China Mobile will also conduct 5G network application demonstration in 12 cities including Beijing, Chengdu, and Shenzhen.
According to Liu Guangyi, CTO for terminal and wireless technology at the China Mobile Research Institution, the trial networks will mostly run in the 3.5 GHz band.
Last year, China Mobile had announced plans to deploy more than 10,000 5G base stations by 2020. The telco also said that it expects to launch a pre-commercial 5G service in 2018.
Meanwhile, China Unicom announced plans to trial 5G in 16 cities including Beijing, Tianjin, Qingdao, Hangzhou, Nanjing, Wuhan, Guiyang, Chengdu, Shenzhen, Fuzhou, Zhengzhou, and Shenyang.
China Telecom will start testing 5G technology in six cities including Xiong’an, Shenzhen, Shanghai, Suzhou, Chengdu and Lanzhou.
The government of China has already kicked off the third phase of its own 5G trials. The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology said the third phase of 5G technical tests aims to get pre-commercial 5G products ready by mid-2018.
In September, the second phase of tests on the 5G network’s wireless portion were finished. Telecom companies have met the key performance requirements set up by the International Telecommunication Union, such as the peak rates of data speed. Vendors including Huawei, ZTE, Ericsson and Nokia as well as local mobile operators China Mobile, China Unicom and China Telecom participated in this phase of China’s 5G tests.
Last month, Chinese vendor Huawei said it became the first vendor to pass China’s 5G non-standalone (NSA) core network test, which covers key core network technologies and service processes and marks the third phase of the country’s 5G R&D trial.
The 5G trial was organized by the IMT-2020 (5G) promotion group and conducted at the Beijing lab of the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology (CAICT).
The vendor said the test is based on the commercial 5G core network solution released by Huawei at the Mobile World Congress 2018, which took place in Barcelona earlier this year. The technologies tested include: gateway selection in control and user plane separation (CUPS) architecture, 5G ultra-high bandwidth, dual-connection to LTE and new radio (NR), independent billing for 5G NR, and terminal access management. The key service processes include: terminal registration, service requests, mobility management, and session management, Huawei said.
The 5G network test was performed by CAICT’s network technology workgroup together with local mobile operators China Mobile, China Telecom and China Unicom.
