Canada’s Rogers Communications has announced a multi-year mobile network technology development plan in partnership with Ericsson, including 5G tests. Under the plan, Rogers will continue to roll out a Gigabit LTEnetwork based on technology including 4×4 MIMO, four-carrier aggregation and 256 QAM, and will boost and densify its network with small cells and macro sites across the country. Ericsson and Rogers will meanwhile trial 5G in Toronto, Ottawa and other selected cities over the next year.

On 16 April the partners demonstrated multiple live 5G examples at the Rogers Centre testing environment. Participants wore virtual reality (VR) glasses to toss a baseball back and forth, virtually shopped in a retail store, and controlled robots with real-time responsiveness. Rogers also demonstrated quad-band Licensed Assisted Access (LAA) on Gigabit LTE to show how LAA provides high bandwidth, simultaneously across several devices

Thanks to TeleGeography for this article