Bharti Airtel on Thursday announced that it had successfully completed a commercial test of 5G in the city of Hyderabad. This was made possible by operating both 5G and 4G with the same spectrum, using a dynamic model of spectrum sharing. This also validated the readiness of the network provider in all three domains of the network, namely Radio, Core and Transport. This feat was made possible with the use of Bharti Airtel’s existing spectrum in the 1800 MHz band, via the NSA network technology. A video obtained by TelecomTalk from Airtel’s test network in Hyderabad gave us a glimpse at the speeds. In the video, we can truly see 5G in action, showing that Bharti Airtel was not just talking, instead, the company actually conducted tests, with the results being pretty good, if not amazing.
What Does the Video Show?
When the network speed was tested, the 5G speeds were pretty good, with a download speed of 310 Mbps and an upload speed of 65 Mbps.
While this is not the crazy gigabyte per second speed that was promised during the launch of 5G, considering the circumstances and the equipment, this is still quite impressive. The speed test results have been included in this article. To further prove this speed, the video included a download of a massive 1GB file, which gets completed within 30 seconds. This was a true test of 5G, which was capable of demonstrating how big of a leap this new tech really is.
In the past, we were able to achieve download speeds of around 160 Mbps on Airtel’s LTE+/4G+ network. But the 4G LTE speeds in India never crossed 200 Mbps, even on the country’s LTE-only network Reliance Jio. So the speeds of over 300 Mbps is a first for any Indian telecom operator, but as we said above, this is not the true potential of 5G.
Is 5G Ready to Launch?
No, as we mentioned in our previous articles, this was nothing more than an announcement, with Bharti Airtel itself stating that it would prefer to use better spectrums so as to achieve full 5G speeds. Add to that the fact that government clearance is necessary for the rollout of 5G, it is but a distant dream as of today. That being said, this test did showcase the readiness of Airtel and, when 5G does get permission to have a public launch, the company will have something to offer, rather than just stating that it is going to launch it’s 5G on a particular date.
