UK's telecom regulator Ofcom has released the outcome of the principal stage of its 4G, 5G spectrum auction. EE, Telefónica, Vodafone came out as big winners. Ofcom has been running an auction of spectrum in two frequency bands: 2.3 GHz, which is usable by current 4G mobile and 3.4 GHz, which is one of the spectrum bands earmarked for 5G.

Cisco and it's partners aim to create a UK government funded complete end-to-end rural 5G testbed system for trials of new wireless and networking technologies, spectrum sharing, new applications and services with a focus on testing and demonstrating approaches for ensuring that 5G connectivity is accessible and affordable in hard-to-reach rural areas. 

Huawei collaborated with NTT DOCOMO and TOBU RAILWAY in 5G system trial at TOKYO SKYTREE TOWN as part of 5G Field Trials initiated by Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications, Japan (MIC).

Singtel in partnership with Ericsson has rolled out a nationwide commercial cellular Internet of Things (IoT) network in Singapore. This advanced mobile network technology will help accelerate the proliferation of IoT devices by offering the best coverage, power efficient and cost-effective solutions to enterprises.

‌Nokia, Intel and Verizon are collaborating on new Cloud RAN architectures to provide the flexibility needed for the operator's future services and requirements for 4G, 5G and IoT in the cloud.

Under the theme of “Perfect 5G,” SK Telecom plans to lay out the company’s 5G technologies and announce the soon-to-be arriving 5G era.

Huawei has launched an end-to-end user trial for “Wireless to the Home” (WTTx) 5G service using a specially-designed 5G CPE (Customer Premise Equipment) unit. The trial is taking place in downtown Vancouver’s “5G Living Lab,” a co-venture with TELUS. 

Qualcomm has demonstrated next phase of the global 5G New Radio (NR) standard at an event in San Diego on February 7th. Following the recent completion of the first 5G NR standard, 3GPP has approved various technology studies that are expected to define the next phase of 5G NR in Release 16 and beyond.

Nokia and Qualcomm have announced the successful completion of interoperability testing in the 3.5Ghz and 28Ghz spectrum compliant with the global 3GPP 5G NR Release 15 standard. Tests utilized the commercially available Nokia AirScale base station and device prototypes from Qualcomm.

Optus plans to roll out 5G technology in Australia by early 2019 with a fixed wireless product in key metro areas. This announcement follows the launch of a successful outdoor trial for 5G New Radio, which showed 2Gbps download speeds using a potential device for a fixed wireless service in the home and business.

Nokia has launched its new ReefShark chipsets, which leverage in-house silicon expertise to reduce the size, cost and power consumption of operators' networks and meet the massive compute and radio requirements of 5G.

Turkcell and Huawei have completed LTE Spectrum coordination on Antalya's commercial LTE network with Huawei’s latest eRAN13.1 solution. This solution enables coordination between high and low LTE bands to realize channel selection based on a user’s experience and maximize user throughput.