Operator MTN South Africa and leading tech vendor Huawei say that they have completed the first 5.5G network trial in South Africa at the MTN head office in Johannesburg.
During the trial, MTN South Africa used Huawei’s SingleRAN ultra-wideband active-antenna units and applied hybrid beam-forming architecture in conjunction with flexible dynamic beam management and inter-FR carrier aggregation technologies.
Spectrum resources in the millimetre wave and C-band, using spectrum obtained through a trial licence, were used on site in 5G standalone mode.
MTN says it achieved an ultra-high-speed experience of 8.6 Gb/s to a user.
A 5.5G network has ten times network performance compared to current 5G technology, massively improving connection speeds, the number of Internet of Things connections and latency, but doing so with less energy consumed on a per terabyte basis.
MTN South Africa CTO Rami Farah, quoted by Engineering News, says: "The 10 Gb experience will expand new commercial services for consumers, households, and enterprises, accelerating the development of advanced use cases such as 24K extended reality, high-speed fixed wireless access, holographic conferencing, and enhanced 5G private networks, among others."
This is the latest in a number of recent partnerships between these two companies. In late October MTN and Huawei completed the world’s first commercial deployment of the innovative SDB IBT 2D microwave solution in Johannesburg, a breakthrough solution that leverages super dual band (SDB) and two-dimensional intelligent beam tracking (IBT 2D) to prevent pole shaking from affecting link stability in dual-band scenarios.
We also reported in June that MTN and Huawei had signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) for strategic cooperation on Net5.5G, the so-called next generation of IP networks.
In addition, MTN parent company MTN Group announced in April that it had inaugurated a Technology Innovation Lab in partnership with Huawei Technologies.
