Outdoor Experimental Trials of Long Range Mobile Communications Using 39 GHz

The commercialization of 5G is planned by multiple operators worldwide in the coming few years around 2020. 5G is expected to support new services and higher frequency bands. In particular, the use of higher frequency bands above 6 GHz for mobile communications is one new and important technical challenge tackled by 5G. However, in the initial deployments of 5G, higher frequency bands would only be used for limited areas, e.g., small cell deployments, or fixed wireless access. To further extend the benefits of higher frequency bands to wider coverage and usage, it is important to enable a wide use of higher frequency bands to a similar level as those of existing low frequency bands in terms of coverage, power consumption, etc. In this paper, we present our outdoor experimental trials of long range mobile communications using 39 GHz band. The trial results demonstrate the potential of higher frequency bands to support Gbps class data rates while still providing coverage and supporting mobility over a coverage area of above 1 km.