The global telecommunications industry is buzzing at the moment about the looming arrival of 5G and what that might mean for consumers (and for the industry itself).

At NBN Co, we are excited about what 5G might be able to do for end users on Fixed Wireless connections to the nbn™ broadband access network across regional and rural Australia, so we are delighted to announce that we have successfully completed our first trials of 5G New Radio (NR) technology.

Promising 5G NR test results

We conducted our 5G NR tests – meaning we tested the radio equipment – alongside our Fixed Wireless technology partner Ericsson in the outer-eastern Melbourne suburb of Pakenham.

The 5G NR equipment we used was shipped to Australia from Ericsson’s research-and-development headquarters in Sweden to help NBN Co better understand what 5G might mean for our future Fixed Wireless end users.

The first advantage we can gain from 5G is from the spectral efficiency of the technology. This means we can potentially get a lot more out of the spectrum that we have available. This, in turn, should help provide more capacity and help to reduce congestion for end users.

At NBN Co, we know it is a very difficult problem to solve the reality of multiple users on a shared medium, such as Fixed Wireless, using streaming applications in terms of peak wholesale speed and capacity support. We will be conducting further analysis to look at the potential of 5G to support peak-time capacity.

In our tests at Pakenham, using 100MHz of spectrum in the 3.5GHz Fixed Wireless band, NBN Co measured total throughput of 1.3Gbps. This represents an almost 25x increase on today’s throughput, which is great news for the volume of traffic Fixed Wireless connections on the nbn™ access network can potentially handle in the future.

In the future, another significant improvement that 5G would be able to deliver on Fixed Wireless connections to the nbn™ access network is lower latency for end users. Our 5G NR tests measured ‘round-trip’ latency times below 5ms.

This means that future 5G-enabled end users with Fixed Wireless connections on the nbn™ access network could be able to use online applications that require lower latency, such as virtual reality or online gaming, with a better quality of experience.

Plenty of room on 4G

Although we are very excited about 5G, we are still some time way from launching commercial Fixed Wireless services that leverage 5G.

While we may see some operators launch early versions of the technology, 5G is still not quite ready for commercial Fixed Wireless deployment.

By adopting new technologies such as massive Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO) active antennas, we may be able to substantially increase capacity on our 4G network and improve the end-user experience before we even get to 5G.

These new technologies like MIMO are used on 4G spectrum to users within a Fixed Wireless ‘cell’, thereby potentially increasing capacity many times over in a Fixed Wireless cell.

So, there is a way to go yet before we deploy 5G on Fixed Wireless connections to the nbn™ access network. In the meantime, our people are going to continue examining how 5G can transform the online experience and deliver even more benefits to our Fixed Wireless end users across regional and rural Australia.