5G trials for rural broadband has begun in India on Thursday. The test is being conducted at Ajol Village, Gujarat. For the 5G trial, a base transceiver station (BTS) was installed 17 km away at Unava town in Gandhinagar. As per an ET Telecom report, a team of two private mobile service providers along with the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) officials reached the Ajol village for measuring the speeds achieved. A peak download speed of 105.47 Mbps and upload speed of 58.77 Mbps was recorded.
5G Trials Being Done to Test Multiple Use Cases Including VR Connected Classroom
According to the publication’s report, multiple use cases are being tested in the 5G trials in Ajol. Use cases such as virtual reality (VR) connected classroom, 360 degrees virtual reality content playback, and more are being tested. VR connected classroom would connect the student directly with the teacher even if the two are sitting thousands of kilometres apart.
5G immersive gaming is also being tested along with a 360-degree digital experience for the users where the users can move around and identify the objects and people in a given environment.
As per a tweet from the PIB_India Ministry of Communications, a team of senior DoT officials from Gujarat circle along with the technical team of Nokia and Vodafone Idea Limited (VIL) visited the 5G testing sites in the rural area of Gandhinagar.
In November, Vodafone Idea (Vi) and Nokia had partnered for testing 5G in rural India using spectrum in the 3.5 GHz band allocated by the Department of Telecommunications (DoT). The third-largest telco and Nokia had seen a peak download speed of 100+ Mbps, and the trial network area was covering 17.1 km.
Vodafone Idea has already tested multiple use-cases using 5G trials by partnering up with several companies and coming generation startups. Vi has been able to achieve a peak download speed of 4.2 Gbps during 5G trials using mmWave 5G spectrum and upload speeds of over 200 Mbps.
