Samsung Electronics today announced it has achieved the industry’s fastest 5G speeds in a lab demonstration that combined 800MHz of mmWave spectrum with MU-MIMO (Multi-User, Multiple-Input, Multiple-Output) technology, running on the world-leading Samsung 5G mmWave Access Unit.

Using two test mobile devices, the demonstration achieved approximately 4.3Gbps speeds on each, reaching an industry peak speed of 8.5Gbps across both devices. In order to achieve the speed, two key technologies were used: carrier aggregation and MU-MIMO.

This demonstration highlights the key difference of 5G – its use of mmWave spectrum. The wide bandwidth from mmWave spectrum enables mobile operators to provide multi-gigabit speeds that lower band spectrums are unable to match.

Today, a number of countries – including Japan, South Korea, and the U.S. – have already assigned 5G mmWave spectrum, and two of them have already launched their commercial 5G services using the spectrum. Also, more than 15 nations are expected to join the 5G mmWave club in the coming years.

Samsung Networks has created and deployed 5G end-to-end solutions ranging from chipset, radio, and core network to cloud platform for both mid-band (2.5GHz/3.5GHz) and mmWave (28GHz/39GHz) frequencies. The company has been supporting 5G commercial services in leading markets, including Korea and the U.S., currently two of the largest commercial deployments in 5G subscriber count. It is now also supporting the commercial deployment of 5G in Japan. Finally, Samsung is also expanding its global 5G market footprint rapidly to new markets including Canada and New Zealand.