Voice communications in New Zealand is in for a massive upgrade with Spark New Zealand, the country’s main telecom operator, announcing it is switching from the ageing Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) to a next generation IP-based network.
AARNet, Google, Indosat Ooredoo, Singtel, SubPartners, and Telstra announced they have entered into an agreement with Alcatel Submarine Networks (ASN) to build a new international subsea cable system that will connect Singapore, Indonesia and Australia.
Korea Telecom (KT) Chairman Hwang Chang-gyu announced that it succeeded in a 5G field test on an airport railway which connects Seoul city center and Incheon to show a successful 5G pilot service in 2018.
Singapore telecom operators Singtel and StarHub have acquired the majority of spectrum that was auctioned in Singapore of three frequency bands, which generated SDG1.15 billion ($822 million). The auction was held by the Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA) which auctioned off 175MHz of spectrum in the 700MHz, 900MHz and 2.5GHz bands. Winners will be able to use their new spectrum on July 1.
Nokia and China Unicom are conducting a live trial in China Unicom's commercial network using the Nokia Virtualized Services Router (VSR). The trial involves more than 5,000 residential subscribers and allows China Unicom to simplify and accelerate the delivery of residential broadband using a new, agile and flexible network which is based on virtualized network functions (VNFs).
Australian operator Optus announced a strategic partnership with the Gold Coast 2018 Commonwealth Games Corporation (GOLDOC) and Commonwealth Games Australia (CGA) that will see it become the official support network of the Gold Coast 2018 Commonwealth Games (GC2018) and provide the event’s communications infrastructure and managed services.
Telkomsel recently announced Indonesia’s first FDD Massive MIMO demonstration in collaboration with Huawei. The demonstration achieved five times capacity of traditional FDD LTE 2x2 MIMO. As Massive MIMO is one of the key technologies of 5G, this successful demonstration realizes 5G-like experience in 4.5G network, and also marks 4.5G evolution, the beginning of 5G journey for Telkomsel 2017.
Ericsson has completed the first demonstration of 5G in Indonesia, including 5G test bed, 5G New Radio (NR) and use cases such as a motion-sensing robotic arm and live 4K video streaming.
Bharti Airtel, India’s largest telecommunications services provider, said that it doubled its mobile network deployment over the past two years in line with its objective of building a future ready network to lead India’s data growth story.
Recently, MTN South Africa, Qualcomm Technologies and Huawei jointly completed a 4x4 MIMO field trial in a live network, where the average download throughput increased by 74 percent compared to traditional LTE 2x2 MIMO. Based on that excellent performance of the technology, MTN plans to rollout South Africa's largest 4x4 MIMO network in 2017 to provide users with the best 4.5G experience.
