S08 CAF 1 2020 Test and measurement_ 5G trials in Africa_Layout 1 27/02/2020 15:00 Page 23
5G trials
TEST AND MEASUREMENT
Testing tomorrow today: 5G on trial in Africa South Africa has been in the news recently as a country leading the way in 5G trials and rollout in the African continent. Phil Desmond asks Jacqui O’Sullivan, MTN South Africa’s Executive for Corporate Affairs, to explain her company’s approach to 5G, and takes a look at 5G trials elsewhere in Africa.
Photo: MTN
The 5G drive continues – and connected cars are one of the test cases.
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OUTH AFRICAN OPERATOR MTN has been trialling 5G for some while now. What sort of information were the recent South African 5G trials put in place to bring to light? MTN SA’s executive for corporate affairs, Jacqui O’Sullivan, explains that MTN South Africa has trialled various cases of 5G in cooperation with companies such as Ericsson and Huawei. “So far,” she says, “the use cases tested have shown great promise, having demonstrated mobility and fixed wireless applications in both indoor and outdoor settings.” Even at this early stage the various trials achieved throughput speeds of up of 1.6 gigabits per second (Gbps) as well as 520Mbps downlink and 77Mbit/s on the uplink respectively. Among the 5G trials, Ericsson conducted an indoor trial at MTN head offices in January 2018 and a mobility-enabled-by-5G trial at the Gerotek testing facility in Pretoria in July 2018. Huawei, meanwhile, conducted an outdoor
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trial in Pretoria in May 2018. Regular readers will be aware that, in 2018, MTN successfully launched a live 5G indoor solution at Kyalami Grand Prix Circuit and International Convention Centre. This was the first time that MTN SA had deployed a trial 5G network in an indoor business environment with standards-based commercial-grade 5G network equipment and devices. More recently, in 2019, MTN, together with Huawei, launched a C-band 5G trial on the first day of AfricaCom 2019, as part of the operator’s network evolution plan towards 5G. This trial demonstrated the capability of this new technology while giving customers a glimpse of what the future holds, showcasing
We will continue to build our network to be 5G-ready in terms of architecture and capacity
the next generation of applications for consumer and enterprise customers. O’Sullivan explains: “These pilots have provided infrastructure vendors like Ericsson and Huawei the opportunity to advance from the planning and research phase to collaborative testing with the mobile network operators to ensure that their technology works in a real-life setting.” Like many trials, these were about use cases as well as technology. Thus, even though various international standards bodies are finalizing the standards for 5G, MTN SA continued to work on future-proofing and preparing the network by conducting the first 5G trial in Africa with Ericsson at the beginning of 2018 – where it registered speeds of over 20 Gigabytes per second. “In May, the operator successfully demonstrated a fixed wireless access (FWA) use case in Africa’s first live outdoor 5G trial with an endto-end Huawei 5G solution in a real-life environment,” says O’Sullivan. These past pilots have enabled
Communications Africa Issue 1 2020
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