A significant milestone on the road to 5G networks in 2019 for all us to use has occured today. KT, Qualcomm and Samsung have announced today the successful completion of multi-vendor 5G NR interoperable testing compliant with the recently completed 3GPP Release-15 Non-Standalone (NSA) 5G NR global standard. Following the guidelines of KT Corporation, the live, over-the-air interoperable testing demonstrated data connections operating in 3.5 GHz and 28 GHz bands, utilizing pre-commercial 5G NR base stations from Samsung and 5G NR UE prototypes from Qualcomm Technologies.
The live demonstration, which was held in Samsung’s lab in Suwon, South Korea, achieved multi-gigabits per second downlink speeds, as well as latencies as low as 1 millisecond. The fiber-like speeds and low latencies will be essential to meeting the increasing connectivity requirements ofor such uses as virtual/augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, gaming, 4K HDR video, etc.
“The cooperation, led by the major game changers of the industry like KT and Qualcomm Technologies, is important to the progress of 5G and its implementation,” said Paul Kyungwhoon Cheun, executive vice president and head of the R&D, networks business, Samsung Electronics. “As an active participant of 5G NR development, Samsung is extremely excited to see that our joint efforts have opened up the pathway for business models and use cases yet to be experienced.”
The 5G NR interoperability demonstration will be on display at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona from February 26 through March 1 at the Qualcomm Technologies booth in Hall 3 – Booth 3E10, Samsung booth in Hall 2 – Stand 2M20, and KT booth in Hall 4 – Innovation city.
