World Distance Record as 5G mmW Pushes 1Gbps Over 6.5km

A new world record has been achieved after a collaboration between TIM, Ericsson, Casa Systems and Qualcomm resulted in the companies, for the first time, reaching a broadband speed of 1Gbps over a distance of 6.5km from a radio antenna. This was done using 5G tech in the millimetre-wave (mmWave) band on a live network.

The problem with mmWave (mmW) bands for low power wireless communications has been that such signals are extremely weak and thus they don’t tend to travel very far before their usefulness expires. As a result, constructing a mobile network that can harness them tends to be very expensive and is only really viable in busy urban areas (such a network has to be quite dense, meaning a lot more cell sites with capacity fed via fibre etc.).

On the flip side mmW comes attached to plenty of spare radio spectrum frequency, which enables them to carry masses of data and therein resides the key attraction. The new generation of 5G technology has been designed to harness mmW and significant strides have been made in ensuring that such signals can go further than previously thought possible.

The latest example comes from the aforementioned collaboration, which in Rome (Italy) established a line-of-sight Fixed Wireless Access (FWA) network over a distance of 6.5km using the 26GHz band (pictured – top). But most impressive was the fact that this network still managed to achieve a data speed of 1Gbps via the UDP protocol, although it did drop back to 700Mbps when using Ookla’s Speedtest.net service via the TCP protocol.

The setup harnessed Ericsson’s new 5G mmWave high power antenna-integrated radio AIR 5322, installed at the mobile site on Via Oriolo Romano in Rome, equipped with Ericsson’s extended range software. The record was also achieved by using Casa Systems’ new AurusAI, a high-power piece of 5G mmWave customer premise equipment (CPE), and equipped with a Qualcomm® Snapdragon™ X55 5G Modem-RF System with Qualcomm® QTM527 extended-range mmWave antenna module.

Th setup is intended more for serving specific customer premises (homes and businesses) via a fixed wireless broadband link and it won’t remove all of the problems inherent with serving mobile (Smartphone etc.) customers. Nevertheless, the achievement is impressive and it’ll be interesting to see how the costs compare with other FWA solutions, such as those mesh systems using the 60GHz band (here).

Otherwise, the new solution will next be tested in the town of Front (Turin, Italy), where local broadband and mobile connectivity remains poor. The aim will be to give selected users access to “multi-gigabit” speeds using the FWA 5G mmWave technology demonstrated above. “Other industrial districts will subsequently be identified where business customers will be able to try the new technology,” said Qualcomm.

Admittedly it’s worth considering that the above test was clearly conducted during perfect weather and it would be interesting to see what happens when the signal also has to contend with heavy rain.