KT Corporation, Qualcomm Technologies and Samsung Electronics have successfully completed a multi-vendor 5G NR interoperable testing compliant with the 3GPP Release-15 Non-Standalone (NSA) 5G NR global standard.

Following the guidelines of KT Corporation, the live, over-the-air interoperable testing demonstrated data connections operating in 3.5 GHz and 28 GHz bands, utilizing pre-commercial 5G NR base stations from Samsung and 5G NR UE prototypes from Qualcomm Technologies. The achievement is a milestone on the path to standard-compliant mobile 5G NR trials starting in 2018, leading to commercial 5G NR network deployments and multimode smartphone launches anticipated in 2019.

The live demonstration, which was held in Samsung's lab in Suwon, South Korea, achieved multi-gigabits per second downlink speeds, as well as latencies as low as 1 millisecond. The fiber-like speeds and low latencies will be essential to meeting the connectivity requirements of emerging mobile broadband experiences such as virtual/augmented reality, as well as enabling new high-reliability, low-latency services for industrial control, autonomous vehicles and drones, among other use cases.

The end-to-end 5G NR interoperability testing demonstrated the essential components of the 5G NR air interface, including scalable 5G NR OFDM numerology, advanced 5G NR channel coding and modulation schemes, low-latency 5G NR slot structure and 5G NR control and data channel support for Massive MIMO and mobile mmWave.