As a formative operator innovating the United Arab Emirates’ ICT sphere for a more connected tomorrow, du, from Emirates Integrated Telecommunications Company (EITC) has today announced it has achieved the world’s highest peak throughput over a 5G standalone (SA) network by exceeding 2Gbps over a single 5G 100MHz carrier at Band C on its commercial 5G network.

The successful 5G SA demonstration marks the transition to the next phase of du’s commercial 5G network, which is now closer following the completion of a standalone 5G peak aggregate data connection throughput of 2 Gbps (DL+UL) over a single 5G SA carrier at 3.5GHz band with 100MHz bandwidth.

A peak throughput of ~1.8Gbps was achieved at download (DL) and 213Mbps at upload (UL) along with low latency <10ms. The latest 5G milestone was achieved over du’s 5G commercial network using a native cloud 5G SA core network with microservices and containers. A commercial 5G SA smartphone with MIMO 4X4 and 256QAM at DL and MIMO 2X2 and 256QAM at UL was used in the demonstration.

‘Leading 5G commercial network evolution’

Saleem Alblooshi, Chief Technology Officer at EITC, said: “We are committed to supporting the next evolution of 5G with standalone deployment and seamless software evolution to our core and access networks. Through the evolved native 5G cloud core we will be able to support deterministic 5G services with e2e 5G network slicing and guaranteed QOS to support new critical Internet of Things (IoT) and URLLC (Ultra-reliable low latency communication) use cases. Moreover, carrier-grade cloud services can now be offered to our enterprise customers using our cloud native 5GCN with microservices and containers. This is a milestone for telecommunications in the UAE and sets the bar high for future 5G network possibilities in line with the nation’s smart city visions and National Agenda.”

Speed test results for the 5G SA demonstration: https://www.speedtest.net/my-result/a/5450175237