Written by Scott Bicheno for Telecoms.com
In a test environment, Finnish kit vendor Nokia says it not only broke a 5G speed world record but did so over a relatively long distance.
The bad news with millimetre wave (mmWave) is that it has rubbish propagation (range, penetration, etc) characteristics. The good news is that there’s plenty of it, which enables high bandwidth in the event that it makes it from A to B. It is noteworthy, therefore, when that bandwidth promise is realised over a significant distance.
At the OuluZone test facility in Oulu, Finland (i.e. not a real-world, commercial environment), Nokia managed a 5G fixed wireless access (FWA) downlink speed of 2.1 Gbps, and an uplink speed of 57.2 Mbps over a distance of 10.86 kilometres. That speed is apparently a world record and it seems safe to assume that the speed/distance ratio is a new record too.
