Gigabit Era for Mobile: Telefónica and Telia Make Strides

The gigabit era for mobile Internet access is coming faster than many believe.

New improvements in 4G platforms will boost 4G network speeds to a gigabit per second on Telefónica networks in Spain, while Telia plans to launch 5G in 2018, supplying gigabit speeds--and possibly multi-gigabit speeds--as well.

Telia plans to launch commercial 5G services in Sweden and Estonia in 2018, and recently demonstrated 5G operating in a real world environment over a live network.

The system used 800 MHz of spectrum in the 15 GHz band and achieved peak rates of 15 gigabits per user, and a latency below three milliseconds.

Separately, Telefónica, Nokia, and Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. have demonstrated download speeds of up to 800 Mbps on Telefónica’s Long Term Evolution 4G mobile network. That is part of work the company is taking to boost peak speeds on its 4G network to a gigabit per second over the next few years.

The test used Nokia radio network equipment and a test terminal equipped with the Qualcomm Snapdragon X16 LTE modem.

To achieve the new throughput, two radio carriers were used, allowing mobile terminals to simultaneously download data from two frequency bands.  MIMO 4x4 technology (Multiple-input Multiple-output) also was used, multiplying the number of data flows that a mobile terminal can use with a given cell.

Also, the new 256QAM modulation (Quadrature Amplitude Modulation) also was employed. Taken together. All of these technologies will be introduced into the Telefónica Spain radio network.