Vodafone UK Test Ultrafast 5G Fuelled WiFi at Manchester Airport

Download speeds of up to 200Mbps have been seen after Vodafone UK added Manchester Airport to their public test sites for future 5G based Mobile Broadband technology. As a result travellers have been able to try ultrafast broadband speeds by connecting to the new network via WiFi.

At present a lot of the early UK tests of 5G technology (mostly conducted via the 3.4GHz band) seem to be more about marketing gimmicks (e.g. Three UK’s mixed reality catwalk at London Fashion Week) than true deployments, which is in no small part due to the lack of final consumer hardware (the first 5G equipped mobiles should follow later this year).

The same is true for Vodafone’s new deployment at Manchester Airport, which invites people to sit inside a special “5G blast pod” (pictured) and connect via an extremely fast WiFi network. The WiFi is distributed via the operator’s “portable” Active Antenna (Massive MIMO) equipped Gigacube router, which itself connected via a short-range 5G radio link that is ultimately fed capacity via a fibre optic connection.

The new technology is often spoken of as being an ultrafast multi-Gigabit speed capable mobile broadband service, but in the real-world such performance may be stunted by the capacity demands of many users, as well as the limitations of your hardware and of the capacity supply itself. In this case WiFi device performance may be the biggest hindrance.

In keeping with that it’s little surprise to find that some speedtests conducted near to the pod tended to vary, although download speeds of around 100-200Mbps were recorded via WiFi (latency times hit around 25-35ms but that may be partly influenced by the speed tester itself) and this compared with c.20Mbps on a standard 4G link.

On top of that it should be noted that at present operators only tend to be using the 3.4GHz band for tests like this, while significantly faster speeds will become possible once Ofcom has auctioned off the next batch of 5G friendly spectrum during 2019 and 2020 (700MHz and 3.6 – 3.8GHz etc.); several bands can be used at the same time via Carrier Aggregation.

Nick Jeffery, CEO of Vodafone UK, said:

“We all love to catch up on our favourite TV shows, play games or finish off some work when travelling. 5G, with its fast speeds and quick response times, will make that quick and easy, even in busy locations. We are proud to be the first provider to bring 5G to an airport and will be adding more major travel hotspots to our 5G network throughout the year.”

All of this appears to complement Vodafone’s on-going pre-commercial 5G trials (here), which began last year and are currently taking place in parts of Birmingham, Bristol, Cardiff, Glasgow, Liverpool and London via the 3.4GHz spectrum band. Some parts of Cornwall, the Lake District and the Scottish Highlands will also be included.