Rogers has announced that it’s starting to roll out the first 5G service in Canada in Vancouver, Toronto, Ottawa, and Montreal.
The service will initially be carried over 2.5GHz, in the four cities downtown core to bring higher throughput for mobile users, although it won’t deliver the ultra-high throughput promised with mmWave just yet.
Eventually, Roger’s 5G service will move to 3.5GHz frequency once its auction concludes. The auction–which is expected to commence later this year–will draw big interests from Canada’s major telcos as an important intermediate step before mmWave rollout.
Rogers will also open services on its 600MHz spectrum down the road, in which it acquired 52 licenses from last year’s auction. The 600MHz frequency is better suited to carry data over long distances and could serve remote areas outside of dense urban settings.
Additionally, Rogers has also announced that it’s a member of the newly-founded 5G Future Forum, a global forum that develops interoperability specifications across major 5G technology leaders including América Móvil, KT, Rogers, Telstra, Verizon and Vodafone.
Now that 5G networks are beginning to take a concrete form in Canada, the conversation then turns to how and who will take advantage of 5G. Nokia, a prominent 5G partner of Shaw, stressed that consumer use cases will be the biggest driver of 5G. Throughout the rest of the year, Canada will finally receive 5G-ready smartphones.
Rogers has yet to announce a pricing structure and accurate throughput figures.
Correction: Nokia actively develops 5G technologies with Shaw who owns Freedom Mobile. The story has been amended for higher accuracy.