Small Cell Innovation: TELUS, Huawei Lead the Way in Canada’s Journey to 5G

Latest advancement in Vancouver “TechCity 5G Living Lab” provides seamless speeds in excess of 1 Gbps both indoors and outdoors

Huawei and TELUS, Canada’s fastest growing national telecommunications company, have successfully deployed an innovative small-cell solution to deliver lightning-fast speeds exceeding 1 Gbps in both indoor and outdoor networks in the downtown-Vancouver “TechCity 5G Living Lab”.

This innovative new deployment ensures customers will be able to move seamlessly between indoor and outdoor locations without noticing a change in network quality, especially when using wireless applications that demand higher speed and data requirements.

In the outdoor live-testing environment, TELUS has deployed a suite of leading-edge technologies including 5-channel carrier aggregation (5CC), 4x4 multiple-input, multiple-output radio access (4T4R MIMO) and 256 QAM modulation to provide those peak speeds in excess of 1 Gbps.

These advanced network technologies provide TELUS customers best-in-class speed, coverage, and quality of service to support data-heavy applications such as video streaming, big data applications and next-generation Internet of Things (IoT) devices.

TELUS is a long-time leader in optimizing indoor small-cell wireless services in areas where significant pedestrian traffic can create network congestion, including hotels, office buildings, arenas and public outdoor sites.

Recently, in combination with the 5CC, 4T4R and 256 QAM technologies, Huawei’s LampSite system achieved a throughput of over 1 Gbps, believed to be amongst the fastest small-cell speeds to date by any operator globally. With 80 per cent of cellular data traffic now indoors, this achievement represents another valuable step in providing fast and reliable service to regularly crowded areas.

“TELUS is committed to offering our customers ultra-fast, reliable and innovative mobile services. Achieving seamless outdoor-indoor access helps us build the foundation of next-generation networks that meet our customers’ ever-increasing need for wireless data,” said Ibrahim Gedeon, TELUS’ Chief Technology Officer. “As we enhance our network capabilities on the journey to 5G, TELUS’ aggressive network investments are laying the groundwork for Canada’s fast, agile and intelligent wireless networks of the future.”

"We are delighted that TELUS continues to deploy Huawei's innovative small-cell solutions to support their heterogeneous network and achieve data rates exceeding 1 Gbps with the Huawei LampSite solution,” said Ritchie Peng, President of Huawei Small Cell Product Line. “With data rates exceeding 1 Gbps with Huawei’s LampSite Solution, TELUS customers can experience these speeds everywhere thanks to the collaboration and experiential learning in the TELUS ‘TechCity 5G Living Lab’.”

Earlier this year, TELUS and Huawei announced the successful live deployment of a 3GPP-oriented network. Since, TELUS has also announced that it has successfully tested other technologies vital to 5G, such as Licensed-Assisted Access (LAA).