Qualcomm, Ericsson and Telstra claim the new world record for mmWave 5G download speeds

The maximum speed achieved by mmWave 5G stands at 4.2Gb/s. Or rather, it did: according to Qualcomm, Telstra and Ericsson, this record has been broken as a result of their latest joint project. This took place in Australia, on the Gold Coast's 5G Innovation Centre, and resulted in a download speed of 5Gb/s.

This was done using a reference mobile device equipped with a Qualcomm Snapdragon X60 5G Modem/RF system and QTM535 mmWave antenna, which are successors to the X55 and QTM527 respectively. It connected to an Ericsson Streetmacro 6701 base station.

Qualcomm now indicates that this breakthrough will be applied to Telstra service soon. On the other hand, the new download record was observed in conditions that simulated a single user with access to a combined 840MHz spectrum, made up of 8 aggregated 5G 100MHz n257 mmWave carriers and 2 aggregated 20MHz LTE Band 7 carriers.

This level of carrier-aggregation (CA) apparently required to get download speeds up to 5Gb/s might not be devoted to individual users in the real world. Nevertheless, Qualcomm insists that this milestone puts its technology closer to realizing the potential of 5G.

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