Ericsson has 5G pilot networks live in Plano, Texas, and Stockholm and is inviting mobile operators, academics, its eco-systems partners and analysts to come and try them out.
Although 5G has not yet been standardized, Ericsson is delving into some of the technologies expected to be a part of 5G. It said its new networks have a technology that it calls Multi-Point Connectivity with Distributed MIMO and are delivering several MIMO streams while a single device is connected to multiple sites at the same time in order to achieve downlink throughput by as much as 100%.
Ericsson also said this week that it has a 5G pilot project to leverage existing and new technologies to test remote control of a Volvo truck transporting ore at a mine, as part of the 5G for Sweden initiative the company launched earlier this year. The pilot for industrial mobile communication is a joint project among Ericsson, ABB, Boliden, SICS Swedish ICT and Volvo Construction Equipment to “find solutions that can be applied in an industry that has traditionally been seen as having a hazardous and challenging operational environment.”
In other 5G news, test company Rohde & Schwarz and Korean mobile operator SK Telecom announced a formal agreement to collaborate on 5G technology testing and development, including measurement and analysis of radio frequency propagation behavior at 6 GHz and higher.
The two companies signed a memorandum of understanding this week to “collaboratively develop key network technologies for 5G,” including channel categorization, a joint 5G test bed for a new air interface and the development of an Active Antenna System expected to play a significant role in enabling 5G. They have actually been doing joint exploration on AAS since 2013.
This continues the momentum and attention to 5G development in 2015, which has been the focus of partnerships for test companies and mobile operators. Testing and exploring 5G was a primary focus for the R&S-hosted LTE Innovation Summit this year – watch a panel discussion on the topic here.
• Anritsu added support for all eight CPRI interface rates, the Open Base Station Architecture Initiative, support for a video inspection probe, and additional features to its portable MT1000A Network Master Pro and MT1100A Network Master Flex for IP transport networks.
• Rohde & Schwarz also this week launched a new option for decoding and analyzing 8b/10b encoded interfaces with automatic configuration, allowing engineers to correlate those interface commands with other circuit signals over time and isolate system design errors. R&S noted that the 8b/10b interface is used in smartphones, in USB 3.0, in HDMI display interfaces and in base stations that rely on the Common Public Radio Interface.
• NetScout celebrated its 30th anniversary with a massive virtual event involving a real-time global video conference and a messaging and photo-sharing portal for all of its 1,100 employees – and it used its own service assurance platform and network monitoring to make sure things went smoothly.
Ken Boyd, CIO at NetScout, said in a statement that the event was “an imposing task due to the real-time nature of data, video and voice services” and connecting NetScout’s offices on three continents, plus mobile users and attendees on WebEx. He added that NetScout’s IT department “individually tracked our LAN, WAN, Internet, Unified Communications and Microsoft SharePoint activity, so that we knew precisely what the user experience was for every connected employee in real-time” during the video conference.
