T-Mobile Poland Launches 5G Network In Warsaw

Deutsche Telekom subsidiary T-Mobile Poland is laying the foundation for commercial 5G in Poland. T-Mobile CEO Andreas Maierhofer inaugurated Poland’s first fully functional 5G network on 07 December. He was accompanied by Polish Digital Minister Marek Zagorski, Deutsche Telekom CEO Tim Hottges and Srini Gopalan, the Deutsche Telekom board member for Europe.

The project will start with four base stations based for the future standard 5G New Radio (5G NR). First, the centre of Warsaw will be covered, then T-Mobile will gradually expand the 5G network to other cities. Further planning will depend on licensing and frequency allocation by the Polish regulator UKE.

T-Mobile Poland has distributed the first devices that enable access to the 5G network to selected business customers and partners. This enables partners to test and further develop their own business applications and products on the actual 5G network, so that they can later offer them on the mass market.

At the same time, the #5G_Lab in Warsaw has been opened. Here, the mobile operator showcases 5G applications and presents the possibilities of the future. Using the latest virtual and augmented reality technology, visitors can try out 5G applications from the industrial, smart city and entertainment sectors.

The 5G network in the centre of Warsaw uses commercial 5G technology from Huawei and will be integrated into the live network infrastructure. This means it interacts with T-Mobile’s existing LTE technology. This enables connections and field tests of future 5G services under real conditions. The antennae currently use the 3.5 GHz spectrum as part of a test licence. The technology, the software used, and the terminals are based on the 3GPP standards for 5G New Radio in the non-standalone version.

Advanced antenna techniques are used to increase capacity and data rates in 5G NR compared to LTE: Massive MIMO greatly increases the number of antenna elements deployed at both the base station and in the subscriber device.

The set-up in Warsaw is similar to that of the Berlin 5G cluster of Telekom in Germany. Deutsche Telekom had already shown Europe’s first 5G data connection on the Berlin live network in May.

Recently, Orange Poland announced testing 5G in Gliwice. – Telecom Paper