BT UK Trial Boosts 5G Standalone Upload Speeds to 230Mbps+

Telecoms giant BT (EE) and network supplier Nokia claim to have pushed mobile broadband upload speeds to over 230Mbps on a new trial network, which operated by harnessing the uplink aggregation of two carrier components in live spectrum for a 5G Standalone (SA) network.

Combining multiple radio bands together to boost mobile data speeds and coverage is nothing new, with Carrier Aggregation (CA) – also known as Carrier Components (CC) – technology being a common feature on 4G networks. The same capability also exists for 5G and operators are slowly starting to harness this, often as part of upgrades toward a true end-to-end 5G Standalone (SA) network (these remove reliance on existing 4G networks).

A year ago BT and Nokia became one of the first European mobile operators to aggregate four downlink (download) channels of radio spectrum in a live 5G SA network (here) – adopting 4CC across four low-band and mid-band radio channels (2.1GHz, 2.6GHz, 3.4GHz and 3.6 GHz). The latest trial does something similar for the uplink side, using both 2CC CA uplink and 4CC CA downlink simultaneously.

The tests were conducted at BT Group’s facility in Adastral Park, UK, using Nokia’s 5G AirScale kit and a device powered by a Snapdragon® 5G Modem-RF System from Qualcomm, following initial lab-based trials. Speeds of over 230Mbps in the uplink were reached – including the wider 5G FDD carrier at 40MHz in 2.6GHz – as well as over 1Gbps in the downlink.

The demonstration was conducted with 15, 30 and 40MHz NR2600 (2.6GHz band) carrier independently aggregated with a 40MHz NR3500 (3.5GHz band) carrier component. BT claims this trial also means they’re the “first in Europe” to achieve both 2CC CA uplink and 4CC CA downlink simultaneously.

Greg McCall, BT’s Chief Networks Officer, said:

“Carrier aggregation will be key to delivering the very best 5G experience to our customers, with this latest trial in partnership with Nokia demonstrating significant performance increases in terms of uplink speeds. This builds on last year’s success of achieving 4CA in 5G SA downlink, and we look forward to achieving further milestones in this space as we continue to progress towards 5G SA.”

BT clearly sees the adoption of 5G SA networks as being one way for EE to “maintains its unbeatable 5G network for customers,” although at present Three UK tends to be the operator that delivers the fastest 5G mobile download speeds in most studies (examples here and here). But crucially, Three UK itself hasn’t really done much on the 5G SA front, although that will change if their merger with Vodafone is approved by regulators.

We note that the “unbeatable 5G” claim used above is attributed to a recent report from RootMetrics (here), but its awards were largely based on the combined performance of 4G and 5G connectivity. Not to mention that they only really focus on urban connectivity, didn’t touch on upload speeds and merely noted that all the 5G capable operators delivered sub-60ms latency (this isn’t expected to change until 5G SA becomes more common).

The same RootMetrics report also noted that Three UK was the fastest 5G mobile operator with median downloads of 202.2Mbps – compared to EE’s 144.6Mbps, Vodafone’s 131.5Mbps, and O2’s (VMO2) 75.1Mbps.