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. 

The current trial is being conducted in the homes of Vancouver-based TELUS employees and is based on the successful 5G 3GPP mmWave tests that TELUS and Huawei conducted in June 2017. The 5G wireless trial system provides users with a fibre-like experience with their home network.

In addition to the 5G in-home equipment, the network utilizes the 5G gNodeB and related elements built as part of the TELUS/Huawei 5G Living Lab. The trial system operates on the 28GHz mmwave band with 800 MHz of bandwidth and includes many 3GPP key technologies, such as Massive MIMO, F-OFDM, and Polar Code.

5G-capable wireless solutions have the potential to complement fibre to the home (FTTx) solutions by providing an alternative “last-mile” solution consumer and business services. In both urban and suburban regions, the ability to deploy 5G wireless solutions will help reduce costs for operators and increase accessibility of 5G for end customers. 5G networking equipment also requires a much smaller footprint than traditional mobile networks, reducing requirements for government approvals of new tower locations.

The first trials were initiated on December 4th, 2017 and the initial application has successfully achieved single-user download speeds of over 2 Gbps.

For Huawei, the use of a new 5G CPE (Customer Premise Equipment) represents another milestone in bringing consumer-oriented 5G-ready products to market.