Alongside the completion of network optimization, Celcom has also talked about its 5G effort during a press conference earlier this week. Specifically, the telco has announced that its 5G network will be present during the upcoming industry 5G showcase in Cyberjaya this April.
The technology is not something new for Celcom since the telco is one of the first Malaysian telcos to demonstrate 5G network which took place back in 2017. Utilizing a test network that the telco together with one of its main industry partner Ericsson have set up at its old headquarters in Kuala Lumpur, the live demo showed that its 28GHz 5G network was able to deliver download speed of around 17 to 19 Gbps.
As opposed to Maxis though, Celcom didn’t reveal the throughput of its 5G network in Cyberjaya. In his response to our query during the press conference, Celcom Axiata’s CEO, Idham Nawawi has stated that the company is not really focusing on the maximum download speed for its 5G test bed in Cyberjaya but more on the applications that can take advantages of the low-latency characteristic of the 5G network.
Among the use cases that the company will demonstrate at Cyberjaya next month includes connective vehicles and drones alongside holoportation, virtual reality football, and 5G-based fixed wireless access.
Nevertheless, Idham did point out that the quality of service for 5G FWA will definitely be better than the existing 4G network. However, he not able to provide the actual speed that FWA customers able to utilize for the time being since there are still several factors that have not yet been finalized including the actual spectrum allocations from the government.
