Ericsson, Telstra and Intel have completed a 5G non-standalone (NSA) 3GPP data call on a commercial mobile network at Telstra’s 5G Innovation Centre on the Gold Coast Australia in a multivendor setup. With this achievement, the companies have taken 5G out of the lab and into a real-world mobile network environment, Ericsson said. The call over 3.5GHz spectrum brought together the core components from multiple companies required for a real commercial 5G network call.
It included Telstra’s 5G NSA commercial network, licenced 3.5GHz commercial spectrum, Ericsson’s commercial 5G NR radio 6488, baseband and packet core for 5G EPC, a personal Telstra SIM card and the Intel 5G Mobile Trial Platform for the 5G NR UE. The 5G data call used network connection to an Ericsson virtualized 5G packet core (vMME and vEPG) running on Ericsson’s NFVi - the 5G slice was connected into the existing Telstra mobile network, which supports other functions such as backhaul, user authentication, billing and provisioning.
The 5G data call also includes the Intel 5G Mobile Trial Platform for the 5G NR UE, running an early 3GPP Rel15 Intel 4G module and a 5G NSA implementation.
Ericsson, Telstra and Intel pan to continue to conduct 5G tests across multiple use cases ahead of the expected 5G commercial network launch by Telstra in early 2019.
