While it’ll be years before we enjoy gigabit speeds on Galaxy S11’s while bombing down the motorway, Samsung’s leading the charge on defining standards for 5G.
The Korean giant is heading up a 5G mobile broadband research project involving other big names including Intel, Huawei and Nokia.
The international consortium will test out a range of solutions that could be used to power what Samsung’s calling ‘extreme’ 5G mobile broadband, on the 6GHz to 100GHz radio frequency bands.
The joint venture has been christened ‘mmMAGIC’. While sounding like something Homer Simpson might say, the ‘mm’ in mmMAGIC refers to the millimetre band, another name for the EHF (Extremely High Frequency) band of radio frequencies, which will be used in these 5G trials.
It also stands for Millimetre-Wave Based Mobile Radio Access Network for Fifth Generation Integrated Communications. Hmm.
Samsung’s Chang Yeong Kim, executive vice president and head of digital multimedia and communications R&D said: “Completely novel and innovative approaches to mobile communications using higher frequency bands above 6GHz are crucial to realise the envisaged 5G services with diverse and challenging requirements.
“Samsung believes that mmMAGIC will be the flagship consortium that encompasses all its key technical aspects and delivers globally harmonized solutions which truly open up an era of 5G.”
Previous tests have seen Samsung blast gigabit speeds at moving and stationary objects using the 28GHz band.
In the UK, licences for this band is owned by Cable & Wireless UK and Urban Wimax Ltd and it’s unlikley this will be used by commercial mobile networks.
UK telecoms regulator Ofcom is currently inviting the industry to provide input on how 6GHz frequencies and beyond may be used for 5G.
As well as possibly using frequencies north of 6GHz, it’s expected that Freeview signals might have to be shunted out of the 700MHz UHF (Ultra High Frequency) band to make way for 5G services by 2022 at the latest.
Along with Nokia and Huawei, Samsung is joined by Ericsson, Alcatel-Lucent, Intel, current EE co-owner Orange, and current O2 owner Telefonica.
Research institutes and universities including the University of Aalto, Bristol, Chalmers and Dresden plus Fraunhofer HHI, CEA LETI, IMDEA Networks measurement equipment vendors Keysight Technologies and Rohde & Schwarz (who supplied equipment for this small scale Freeview 4K trial) and Swedish signal processing specialists Qamcom make up Samsung’s mmMAGIC fellowship.
Samsung will lead and coordinate mmMAGIC while Ericsson acts as technical manager. Intel, Fraunhofer HHI, Nokia, Huawei and Samsung will each lead one of five technical trials.
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