Samsung 5G-ready massive MIMO equipment used in Sprint’s 5G network in Chicago

Samsung Electronics America today announced at Mobile World Congress 2019 that Sprint is using Samsung’s 5G New Radio (NR) solutions as the carrier prepares to launch its commercial 5G service.

The new 5G NR solution is enabled by adding Samsung software and a channel card to Samsung’s existing Massive MIMO technology, which has been providing enhanced 4G LTE service in U.S. markets on Sprint’s 2.5GHz TDD network since last year. This allows both 4G LTE and 5G commercial service on Sprint’s network using the ‘split mode’ capabilities of Samsung’s MIMO solution, offering a simple, cost-effective transition to 5G. The solution is capable of achieving more than 1.5Gbps throughput speeds.

Samsung’s 5G NR solution will be in the commercial network for one of Sprint’s first 5G cities, Chicago, IL, scheduled to launch commercially in May. Sprint announced their 5G plans today in a press conference at Mobile World Congress.

“Last year, we were proud to deliver enhanced speeds and capacity to Sprint’s customers through Samsung’s massive MIMO solution,” said Lyle Nyffeler, Vice President, Networks Division, Samsung Electronics America. “Today, we are advancing our technology collaboration by taking this next step with Sprint to deliver commercial 5G NR, and supporting their 5G strategy through this milestone in Chicago.”

“Our collaboration on massive MIMO has delivered significant LTE capacity and speed enhancements,” said Scott Santi, SVP of Network Deployment and Operations at Sprint. “With 5G, we look forward to giving Sprint customers even greater experiences from gaming and entertainment services, to IoT and business applications.”

Samsung’s massive MIMO technology plays a key role in Sprint’s 5G evolution. Thesolution’s split-mode capabilities use the same radio for 4G LTE and 5G NR, offering simple transitions to 5G without requiring tower climbs. Additionally, as subscribers purchase 5G phones, excellent performance quality is retained as 4G capacity transitions to 5G. The MIMO technology features 64T/64R antenna array, beamforming, and carrier aggregation, helping operators inject new capacity into networks without purchasing more spectrum or adding new base stations. The system includes 128antenna elements within a compact form factor.

Using Sprint’s 2.5GHz spectrum, Samsung’s 5G solution will drive hyper-streaming and ultra-fast downloading on 5G smartphones, as well as enhanced experiences with mobile gaming, mixed reality (AR and VR) applications and new enterprise use cases.

At Samsung Networks MWC 2019 booth (Hall 2 (2M20)), the company will showcase its commercial 2.5GHz 64T64R Massive MIMO unit (MMU), as well as a video of the 5G field testing with Sprint in Chicago, IL. For further information on Samsung’s Networks solutions visit here.

“At MWC 2018, Samsung plans to show how our homes, cars and cities can be transformed by building user-centric 5G networks” said Youngky Kim, President and Head of Networks Business at Samsung Electronics. “Since the beginning of our 5G research in 2012, Samsung stood firm among industry players to trust in the potentials of the millimeter wave spectrum. Our efforts towards advancing this technology will see the light this year, making 5G a reality and opening up new territories’ possibilities for consumers, operators and enterprises.”

Samsung has developed the world’s first complete commercial 5G FWA solutions, which includes: commercial form-factor 5G home routers (CPEs) for both indoors and outdoors, 5G Radio Access Network (RAN) comprised of a radio access unit and virtualized RAN, a next-generation core, as well as AI-powered 3D radio frequency planning tools and services. Using in-house technology and assets, Samsung has managed to develop the first commercial ASIC-based 5G modems and mmWave RFICs, enabling the design of compact access units and CPEs.

These products have already been proven through months of field trials in multiple markets. On February 23rd, the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) granted authorization of Samsung’s 5G access units. These are the first 5G millimeter-wave products in the world to secure government regulatory approval—a milestone achieved through close collaboration with the FCC’s Office of Engineering and Technology.

The solutions will be deployed in the first commercial 5G network to be launched in 2018 in the U.S. For more details, refer to Verizon Selects Samsung for 5G Commercial Launch.

Samsung will also present its first 3GPP Release 15-compliant 5G NR products supporting spectrum bands both below and above 6GHz, to be made available in 2018.

5G-powered Smart Cities

The solutions will enable 5G connectivity for deployments covering a broad range of use cases, greatly enhancing an operator’s ability to explore various business cases and scenarios. A demonstration of a 5G-powered smart city at Samsung’s MWC booth will showcase the difference next-generation technology can bring to streets and transportation, so they are much safer and more convenient. Other demonstrations that illustrate how 5G will work in homes, stadiums, cars and trains are also planned to be presented at the booth.

Other Samsung solutions to be presented will include new LTE radio units and massive MIMO solutions, cloud platform, user-centric network optimization tools as well as services tailored to operators and enterprises’ specific needs.

Samsung Networks’ booth at MWC is located at the Exhibit Hall 2 Stand 2M20 in Fira Gran Via, and will be open from February 26th to March 1st, 2018. To learn more about MWC 2018, please visit www.mobileworldcongress.com.

The live demonstration, which was held in Samsung’s lab in Suwon, South Korea, achieved multi-gigabits per second downlink speeds, as well as latencies as low as 1 millisecond. The fiber-like speeds and low latencies will be essential to meeting the increasing connectivity requirements of emerging mobile broadband experiences such as virtual/augmented reality, as well as enabling new high-reliability, low-latency services for industrial control, autonomous vehicles and drones, among other use cases.

“KT has worked closely with Samsung and Qualcomm Technologies on testing innovative mobile technologies,” said Seo, Chang-Seok, EVP and Head of Network Strategy Unit, KT. “KT believes that this 5G NR trial will pave the way to a successful launch of 5G NR networks and mobile devices, which will mark another technology breakthrough beyond the first broad-scale 5G trial services at the 2018 PyeongChang Winter Olympic Games.”

“As the industry works toward the goal of commercial launches of 5G NR products and networks in 2019, close collaboration among global mobile industry leaders on testing and successful trials are necessary to validate the technologies and continue to build and improve our capabilities,” said Cristiano Amon, president, Qualcomm Incorporated. “We are proud of our achievement with Samsung and KT and look forward to further collaboration on the path to making 5G a commercial reality.”

“The cooperation, led by the major game changers of the industry like KT and Qualcomm Technologies, is important to the progress of 5G and its implementation,” said Paul Kyungwhoon Cheun, Executive Vice President and Head of the R&D, Networks Business at Samsung Electronics. “As an active participant of 5G NR development, Samsung is extremely excited to see that our joint efforts have opened up the pathway for business models and use cases yet to be experienced.”

The end-to-end 5G NR interoperability testing demonstrated the essential components of the 5G NR air interface — fully compliant with 3GPP Release-15 5G NR specifications — including scalable 5G NR OFDM numerology, advanced 5G NR channel coding and modulation schemes, low-latency 5G NR slot structure and 5G NR control and data channel support for Massive MIMO and mobile mmWave.

The 5G NR interoperability demonstration will be on display at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona from February 26 through March 2 at the Qualcomm Technologies booth in Hall 3 – Booth 3E10,  Samsung booth in Hall 2 – Stand 2M20, and KT booth in Hall 4 – Innovation city.