KDDI and Samsung Electronics have announced completing a 5G demonstration on a moving train traveling in Japan, achieving peak speeds of 1.7 Gbps as well as downlink/uplink handover.
According to Samsung, its 5G pre-commercial end-to-end solution - including a 5G router (CPE), radio access unit (5G Radio), virtualized RAN and virtualized core – was used for the test.
The demo, touted as the industry’s first of its kind, was achieved along a section of track where the distance between two stations was approximately 1.5km (nearly 1 mile). The test also involved 8K video being downloaded via the CPE installed on-board, and a 4K video filmed on a camera mounted on the train being uploaded.
Source: Samsung
The trials were carried out from October 17 through 19 in the city of Saitama in Japan, near Tokyo, with the train traveling at more than 100km/hour (over 60 mph).
Samsung said the demo leveraged capabilities driven by 5G, such as high throughput, low latency and massive connections, which verified potential services and use cases that would be highly beneficial to passengers and operators of high-speed trains.
This could pave the way to vastly improved backhaul for onboard WiFi, improved passenger infotainment as well as increased security and analytics, Samsung said.
“In collaboration with Samsung, KDDI has opened up the possibility for new 5G vertical business models, such as a high-speed train,” said Yoshiaki Uchida, senior managing executive officer at KDDI.
“With 5G expected to bring railway services to a whole new dimension, the success of today’s demonstration in everyday locations such as a train and train station is an important milestone indicating 5G commercialization is near.”
Uchida said KDDI aims to launch 5G by 2020, and the operator will continue exploring real-life scenario experiments for diverse 5G use and business cases together with Samsung.
KDDI and Samsung have been working closely on millimeter wave 5G solutions and use cases since 2015. This includes a multi-cell handover demonstration that took place in February, where the device was mounted on a car traveling the busy streets of Tokyo, and a high-speed mobility test with the device attached on a car racing at 200km/h in Yongin, Korea in September.