Samsung Test Pushes 5G Mobile Broadband Speeds to 8.5Gbps

A new lab test conducted by Samsung has used 800MHz of spectrum bandwidth in the mmWave band and MU-MIMO (Multi-User, Multiple-Input, Multiple-Output) technology to push 5G mobile broadband speeds up to hit a new aggregated peak downstream rate of 8.5Gbps (Gigabits per second), albeit only over a very short distance.

The company claims that its test, which also harnessed Carrier Aggregation by combining spectrum from 8 different bands, represents the “industry’s fastest 5G speeds in a lab demonstration” so far. We aren’t told all the details, although it seems as if that 800MHz of frequency was actually accumulated from different blocks within just the 28GHz mmW band (their kit also supports 39GHz).

Otherwise the setup used one of Samsung’s latest commercial 5G Access Units in its test, which then distributed the signal out to two of their latest end-user modem test units (each achieved a top speed of around 4.3Gbps). You can expect to find similar modems inside the next generation of certain Smartphones or other 5G equipped consumer devices.

The AU being deployed below should theoretically be able to deliver capacity of 10Gbps throughput (shared between multiple end-users), which puts Samsung well on the way to achieving the ITU’s original IMT-2020 specification for 5G, which set a peak downstream rate of 20Gbps.

The achievement is extremely promising for the future, although a very short range lab test is not the same as a real-world field trial or commercial deployment. The big challenge with mmW bands is that, while they can carry more data, you have to sacrifice coverage because such weak signals degrade very quickly over any kind of distance and are easily disrupted.

As a result mmW is generally better suited to limited short-range coverage in dense urban areas (e.g. busy shopping areas), where there’s a lot of demand for capacity, or for fixed wireless access (fwa) style links to individual premises. The limitations of such bands, combined with the slow pace of regulators (e.g. Ofcom) in releasing them for use by 5G, means that only a few countries have actually deployed them (the UK is lagging behind).