The infrastructure in Western Europe is much more advanced than its Eastern Bloc counterpart. But after the fall of the Soviet Union, countries in Eastern Europe have been making a concerted effort to bring their infrastructure up to par with the West. Romania is one of those countries, and the recently opened Romanian telecom authority, ANCOM, just announced it wants to see 5G coverage in major cities throughout the country within the next five years.
The decree was made by the president of ANCOM, Adrian Dita, who also announced the auction to grant the rights for using new radio frequencies in Romania, including the 5G standard.
The auction process is an important component when new radio frequencies are being launched in any region. This brings investments from local and global carriers looking to operate with the new frequencies in the country. According to ANCOM, the auction will be for mobile broadband terrestrial communication systems of 694-790 MHz and 1452-1492 MHz. Bid for frequency sub-bands which were not available in previous sales will also be part of the auction. It will include, 791-796 MHz/832-837 MHz, 2530-2570 MHz/2650-2690 MHz, 3410-3420 MHz/3510-3520 MHz and 3450-3465 MHz/3550-3565 MHz bands.
ANCOM said, “The bands that are under consultation contribute to ensuring the frequency resources needed for the efficient development of communication services in the context of the increased mobile data consumption but also to the implementation of new generation technologies, also known as 5G or [International Mobile Telecommunication] IMT 2020.”
In its drive to get 5G up and running in the country, Telekom Romania and Ericsson (News - Alert) have carried out the first 5G live demonstration in South East Europe with five different use cases to determine the capability of the technology. During the demonstration, they were able to evaluate 5G speeds as well as two cloud robotics and two smart city solutions.
The prototype testbed for 5G was able to achieve aggregate speeds of up to 24 Gbps, which is more than 60 times than the fastest commercial 4G speed in Romania while delivering latency rates at least half of what current networks are able to deliver.
Miroslav Majoros, CEO, Telekom Romania, said at the launch of the trial, “This technology, will create a shift in mind-set for the entire society. It opens the door for immense new possibilities for our customers, for the way they live and work. High speed, mobility, security, intelligent devices, they all have some limitations today, but 5G will give a new perspective and solutions to these current challenges.”
Once fully deployed, 5G will introduce new opportunities to the Romanian economy by providing next generation services to consumers, and a scalable infrastructure with ultra-broadband speeds and very low end to end latency of 1 millisecond or less for enterprises.
Edited by Alicia Young