Nokia, Qualcomm, and UScellular hit 750Mbps over 11kms with mmWave 5G | ZDNet

Nokia, Qualcomm, and UScellular announced on Tuesday a millimetre-wave (mmWave) test had successfully been conducted on UScellular’s live 5G network that hit 748Mbps down and 56.8Mbps up at a range of 11.14 kilometres.

At a distance of around 10 kilometres, the trio said the test reached speeds around the 1Gbps mark.

The equipment used consisted of Nokia’s mmWave range-extending system, and customer premises equipment using Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X55 5G modem and mmWave antenna. The test was conducted at Grand Island in Nebraska using 28GHz spectrum.

The results were touted as showing mmWave could be used to provide rural fixed wireless connectivity.

“These latest trial results reinforce the important role that fast, reliable wireless service plays in keeping people connected no matter where they live or work,” UScellular CTO Mike Irizarry said.

At the start of the year in Australia, the company responsible for the National Broadband Network claimed it had hit close to 1Gbps over a distance of 7.3 kilometres.

NBN had previously said it was looking at using mmWave over 10-kilometre distances.

Elsewhere, Dell Technologies announced on Wednesday it was launching Project Metalweaver to allow carriers to deploy 5G edge, core, and Open RAN solutions, alongside a number of reference architectures.

These architectures include core software from Nokia and Affirmed Networks, private networks from CommScope, multi-access edge computing thanks to Intel, and Mavenir and Dell teamed up for Open RAN on PowerEdge XR11 servers.  

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