Virtual RAN Still Seems To Be North Worth the Effort

Laboratory speed tests are to 5G what a drag race in a sports car is to the average motorist. Just as no driver of a Nissan Note on London roads will ever have need for a 200mph engine, no smartphone user requires a 5.5Gbit/s mobile service to watch Netflix, play games, send messages or visit Elon Musk’s social-media house of horrors (or digital town square, as he calls it). In any case, most of this probably happens on Wi-Fi rather than cellular networks.

But none of that stops technology developers from pushing the envelope, and Verizon, one of the biggest telcos in North America, now claims to have “shattered” the 5.5Gbit/s “speed barrier” in a lab trial. As if to prove how unnecessary it all is, Verizon in its press release included the real-world detail that 5.5 Gbit/s is enough to download 266 Taylor Swift albums in a minute. Because that's exactly the sort of thing a normal person wants to do.

Still, in a typically quiet week of the year for telecom news, some of the technology specifics hold interest. The trial used Samsung's 5G network equipment and a device powered by a Mediatek processor. Verizon also appears to have combined spectrum from six different channels of sub-6GHz spectrum – a process known as carrier aggregation – to spin the needle on that speedometer.

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It's a laboratory showcase, too, for the capabilities of general-purpose technology, with Samsung stumping up its virtual radio access network (RAN) smarts in the trial. This naturally meant running 5G RAN software on a general-purpose processor supplied by Intel, rather than a chip tailor-made for those 5G functions.

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