Etisalat UAE collaborates with Ericsson to ensure UAE is 5G ready

The Ericsson and Etisalat Technology Summit held in Abu-Dhabi last week witnessed the first live 5G trail with outdoor mobility in the UAE region. 
The summit engaged Etisalat’s regional and country specialists in workshops and discussions, during which Ericsson shared insights with Etisalat Group touching upon different areas covering 5G, Internet of things (IoT), network functions virtualization (NFV), cloud and digital transformation. “5G enhances the existing services with additional capacity, higher speeds and lower latency, while supporting a large number of machine-type connections and we witnessed the 5G capabilities in a real world environment over a live network during this trial,” Etisalat Senior Vice President Mobile Network Saeed Al Zarouni commented.
The trial demonstrated tests on speed, latency and beam steering using 800MHz of spectrum in the 15GHz band, demonstrating over 20 times greater performance than what is currently used in 4G networks. The trial also achieved an aggregate site throughput of more than 24Gbps a significant improvement over current 4G networks. “This trial is a key milestone of the extensive collaborative efforts between Etisalat and Ericsson to ensure the UAE is ready for 5G. This next generation of technology will enable organisations to move into new markets and build new revenue streams with radically new business models and use cases, including Internet of things applications,” Ericsson Region Middle East Head of Etisalat Global Customer Unit Petter Järtby confirmed.