SEOUL, Korea – April 14, 2020 – Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. today announced it has achieved the industry’s fastest 5G speeds in a lab demonstration that combined 800MHz of mmWave spectrum with MU-MIMO (Multi-User, Multiple-Input, Multiple-Output) technology, running on the world-leading Samsung 5G mmWave Access Unit (press release, video).
Using two test mobile devices, the demonstration achieved approximately 4.3Gbps speeds on each, reaching an industry peak speed of 8.5Gbps across both devices. In order to achieve the speed, two key technologies were used: carrier aggregation and MU-MIMO (video).
This demonstration highlights the key difference of 5G -- its use of mmWave spectrum. The wide bandwidth from mmWave spectrum enables mobile operators to provide multi-gigabit speeds that lower band spectrums are unable to match. With multi-gigabit speeds, users can experience transformational 5G mobile services. Mobile operators will be able to deliver new and rich services such as 8K video streaming, AR remote learning and holistic VR teleconferencing as well as new use cases that are yet to be imagined.
Today, a number of countries -- including Japan, South Korea, and the U.S. -- have already assigned 5G mmWave spectrum, and two of them have already launched their commercial 5G services using the spectrum. Also, more than 15 nations are expected to join the 5G mmWave club in the coming years.
“Samsung will continue to be at the forefront in advancing 5G mmWave technology,” said Hyunho Park, Senior Vice President, Networks Business at Samsung Electronics. “This successful demonstration proves mmWave’s potential to deliver new kinds of business use cases and open up opportunities for mobile operators. We look forward to building on this significant technical breakthrough to fuel our continuous journey towards an innovative and vibrant mmWave ecosystem.”
Samsung Networks is a pioneer in the successful creation and deployment of 5G end-to-end solutions ranging from chipset, radio, and core network to cloud platform for both mid-band (2.5GHz/3.5GHz) and mmWave (28GHz/39GHz) frequencies. The company has been supporting 5G commercial services in leading markets, including Korea and the U.S., currently two of the largest commercial deployments in 5G subscriber count. It is now also actively supporting the commercial deployment of 5G in Japan. Finally, Samsung is also expanding its global 5G market footprint rapidly to new markets including Canada and New Zealand.