US operator Sprint and Nokia are collaborating on the first live demonstration in the US of a 5G new radio connection over a dual-mode capable Massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) radio.
The companies plan to conduct the demonstration at Sprint's booth during Mobile World Congress Americas between tomorrow and Friday.
The demonstration will use Sprint's 2.5-GHz spectrum, a Nokia base station and Massive MIMO antenna, and a VIAVI 5G test device emulator.
The system can support up to 120 MHz of 2.5-GHz spectrum, and is expected to deliver up to 3Gbps of peak downlink throughput for a single sector over 5G and LTE simultaneously.
Sprint plans to use this capability to offer LTE and 5G on the same radio to meet its customers' growing demands for unlimited data and high-bandwidth applications.
"Sprint has long collaborated with Nokia on its Massive MIMO and 5G innovations, and we're excited by this first live 5G NR system connection to help us bring mobile 5G to the US market in the first half of 2019,” Sprint CTO Dr John Saw said.
“Because of our large spectrum holdings Sprint is one of the only operators in the world with enough capacity to operate LTE and 5G simultaneously using Massive MIMO and huge licensed channels of 100 MHz of spectrum on the same radios."
Nokia and Sprint also plan to showcase other 5G demonstrations including low latency use cases for public safety and car platooning, and an augmented reality demo for enterprises.