Swedish engineers working for Ericsson tested the network at Ericsson’s laboratory at Kista. In the tests, which were a cooperation with SK Telecom Korea. Round-trip latencies of approximately 4ms were achieved, terminating at a gateway outside the experimental core.

The engineers used virtual RAN, over-the-air NR/LTE interworking and Cloud Core. The 5G New Radio (NR) operated over 15GHz on 800Mhz bandwidth.

Ericsson’s Head of Strategy and Technology, Business Unit IT & Cloud Håkan Djuphammar commented: “These live demonstrations with SK Telecom and Telefonica show Ericsson’s long-term commitment to 5G. By leading the development of 5G technologies end-to-end, we are driving 5G technology closer to reality.”

Ericsson is pushing its own 5G research and development. It inked a deal with China Mobile to collaborate on an investigation into the construction of Cloud Radio Access Network (RAN) architecture for 5G, and on establishing new standard interfaces for Cloud RAN.

Earlier in January Ericsson partnered with AT&T and Qualcomm to conduct trials of new 5G specifications for radio frequencies, intended to foster development of 3GPP NR standards in an experiment that will run during Q3 of 2017.

European thinking is that 5G is pivotal to the further development of a connected society looking to benefit from IoT and Big Data so the stakes are high. But if Ericsson wins other telcoms companies will have to invest in a set of Allen keys.