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Intel and Ericsson 5G connected cars trial attains 1Gbps speeds

Intel, Ericsson, Toyota, Denso, and NTT DoCoMo have announced attaining speeds of 1Gbps down and 600Mbps up while streaming 4K video from a connected vehicle across a 5G trial network in Japan.
Written by Corinne Reichert, Contributor
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(Image: NTT)

A 5G trial between NTT DoCoMo, Intel, Ericsson, Denso, and Toyota has attained data speeds of 1Gbps/600Mbps for 4K video streaming in a connected vehicle travelling at 30km/h, the companies have announced.

The trial, conducted at Tokyo's Odaiba waterfront last week, made use of Intel's Go 5G Automotive Platform terminal and on-board antenna head for connected car trials; Ericsson's base stations and cloud-RAN technology; NTT DoCoMo's 5G trial environment; and a Toyota Alphard vehicle.

"This accomplishment marks the first 5G multi-vendor interoperability trial involving a device connected to a base station in an automotive environment," the companies said.

The technology will be demonstrated in Tokyo this week as part of the Japanese telecommunications carrier's open R&D showcase, with the companies also saying they would continue trialling 5G across connected vehicles and other applications.

NTT DoCoMo said it has been operating 5G trial sites since May this year to allow customers to experience new technologies, products, and solutions, with the carrier also collaborating with Toyota on R&D for a 5G connected cars IT platform.

The five companies formed a connected cars big data consortium in August with the aim of connecting cloud computing networks to support real-time mapping, driving assistance, and other services.

The Automotive Edge Computing Consortium said it would be concentrating on developing new architectures to support the expected 10 exabytes a month that will be generated from smart cars, with plans to also propose industry standards and best practices.

Ericsson -- which launched its Connected Vehicle Marketplace back in February, recently announced it is developing an autonomous vehicle software cloud platform, and has similarly been testing 5G connected cars in the United States with Verizon -- and NTT DoCoMo in February also announced that they would be conducting 5G new radio (NR) trials in an effort to speed the commercialisation of 5G network technology.

The trial is slated to take place in the first half of 2018, utilising the mid-band 4.5GHz spectrum in addition to 28GHz millimetre-wave (mmWave) spectrum using 3GPP Release 15 standards on Massive Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (Massive MIMO) antenna technology, which ends multiple channels of data at the same time, allowing users to have peak performances simultaneously; beam forming technology, in which antenna arrays steer a beam to where a user is; adaptive self-contained time-division duplex (TDD) technology; scalable OFDM-based waveforms for wider bandwidths; advanced coding and modulation; and a low-latency slot structure design.

Prototype base station solutions from Ericsson will be used over NTT DoCoMo's trial network environment, with the expectation of achieving multi-gigabit per second data rates and low latency.

"NTT DoCoMo plans to deploy a 5G NR commercial system by 2020, and it is essential that the industry cooperate closely to create a 5G ecosystem in a timely manner," NTT DoCoMo CTO Seizo Onoe said earlier this year.

"Through acceleration of the standardisation and standard-compliant 5G NR trial activities, we will ensure the highly stable 5G services."

NTT DoCoMo similarly undertook 5G testing with Chinese networking giant Huawei a year ago, attaining 11.29Gbps throughput speeds and latency of less than 0.5 milliseconds during a field trial.

The large-scale field trial, conducted in Yokohama Minato Mirai 21 District over the 4.5GHz spectrum band in November 2016, made use of new numerology and frame structure according to 3GPP 5G New Radio current standards.

NTT DoCoMo has also partnered with Nokia on 5G technology, with the companies conducting a trial at the beginning of 2015 that saw them attain download speeds of 2Gbps across 70GHz millimetre wave (mmWave) spectrum.

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Qualcomm and Ericsson will conduct 5G new radio trials with Vodafone in the second half of 2017 and NTT DoCoMo in the first half of 2018 using Massive MIMO, beamforming, and mmWave spectrum.

Huawei and NTT DoCoMo reach 11Gbps speeds in 5G Japanese field trial

A field trial of 5G network technology by Huawei and NTT DoCoMo has seen them reach speeds of 11.29Gbps over the 4.5GHz spectrum band in Yokohama, Japan.

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