Huawei and Bell Canada want to bring Canadians living in rural communities 5G internet by spring 2018.
The two companies conducted trial runs of Wireless to the Home (WTTH) technolgoy in Orangeville, Feversham and Bethany. After the successful commercial trial runs, which according to a Huawei spokesperson, involved actual customers over the past several months, Bell announced this morning it has decided to launch Wireless to the Home (WTTH) capabilities to rural locations in Ontario and Quebec in the second quarter of 2018.
The WTTH trials in the 3.5 GHz and 28 GHz spectrum bands used Huawei’s 5G-oriented Massive MIMO and 8T8R technology. Mao Dun, vice-president of Huawei’s wireless networking marketing and solutions sales said the company is proud to be working with Bell Canada.
“TD-LTE technology is rapidly maturing. Other 5G-oriented technologies, including carrier aggregation, 8T8R and Massive MIMO, can deliver fibre-like access speeds while supporting Bell’s multiple services such as Fibe TV. We believe these advanced technologies will benefit all Canadians,” said Dun in a press release.
Bell Canada wants to deliver the next generation of broadband technology across Canada, added Stephen Howe, Bell’s chief technology officer and executive vice-president, and WTTH is a key part of that goal.
“Our ongoing 5G trials and impending deployment of WTTH in rural and urban locations underscore our focus on full utilization of our assigned wireless spectrum resources,” he said.
In December 2017, Huawei extended its Kanata, Ont.-based Canada Research Centre and partnership with Carleton University to focus on 5G advanced communications research, in addition to signing a partnership with Seneca College to train network technicians on Huawei enterprise equipment. Huawei has been funding research into 5G, which could bring data speeds of up to 100x that of current 4G LTE networks, since 2009.