Samsung completes first successful 5G demo on a train moving at 100km/hour

KDDI and Samsung Electronics have successfully completed the first 5G demonstration on a moving train travelling at over 100 km/hour (over 60 mph). This was achieved along a section of track where the distance between two stations was approximately 1.5km (nearly 1 mile). During the demonstration, the companies achieved a successful downlink and uplink handover as well as a peak speed of 1.7 Gbps.

The tests were carried out from October 17th through the 19th in the city of Saitama in Japan, near Tokyo. For the tests, Samsung’s 5G pre-commercial end-to-end solution was used, which is composed of a 5G router (CPE), radio access unit (5G Radio), virtualized RAN and virtualized core.

The demonstration leveraged capabilities driven by 5G, such as high throughput, low latency and massive connections, which verified potential services and use cases that would be highly-beneficial to passengers and operators of high-speed trains. This could pave the way to vastly improved backhaul for onboard WiFi, superior passenger infotainment and increased security and analytics.

In addition to a successful downlink and uplink handover at more than 100km/hour (over 60 mph), 8K video was downloaded via the CPE installed on-board, and a 4K video, filmed on a camera mounted on the train, was able to be uploaded.

Since 2015, KDDI and Samsung Electronics have been closely collaborating to demonstrate 5G millimeter wave performance in various scenarios. This includes a multi-cell handover demonstration that took place in February, where the device was mounted on a car that traveled in the busy streets of Tokyo (Link), and a high-speed mobility test with the device attached on a car racing at 200km/h in Yongin, Korea in September