The company used Samsung’s Galaxy S10 5G in the tests, using a Qualcomm Snapdragon chip, with 5G infrastructure from Nokia.
Inessa Galaktionova (pictured), MTS first vice president for telecommunications, said: “The first 5G smartphones and routers will go on sale in MTS stores in late 2019 or early 2020, providing our customers the ability to realise the benefits of this next-generation standard by using the high-speed mobile connectivity and digital services provided by MTS’s 5G pilot networks.”
The companies conducted the trials in a Nokia laboratory in Moscow in a pilot millimetre-wave (28GHz) 5G MTS network based on Nokia commercial equipment.
The pre-commercial Samsung handsets had SIM cards from MTS and had Qualcomm Snapdragon X50 5G modem and antenna modules.
The developers tested voice calls, video calls, internet access and file downloads, as well as data transfer from the lab server through the 5G base station to a smartphone with a downlink data rate of “up to 2.1Gbps”.
Galaktionova said: “Not long ago we were testing closet-sized 5G equipment, and today, together with our partners, we showcased a 5G smartphone operating under typical user conditions that externally is indistinguishable from a regular 4G device.”
Demetrio Russo, vice president of Nokia in Eastern Europe, said: “We are prepared to support MTS in implementing the huge potential of 5G in Russia. We are consistently working on joint projects with MTS, aimed at ensuring that the MTS 5G network is fully ready to provide services to the company’s users.”
Yulia Klebanova, vice president of business development at Qualcomm Europe, said that the trial “enables an era of a new generation of communications in Russia”.
She said the millimetre-wave spectrum allows the provision of “virtually unlimited network capacity while supporting multi-gigabit speeds and minimum delay time in locations with exponentially growing traffic in big cities”.
