NCC to conduct Second 5G trial on Thursday

By Ogaga Ariemu

The Nigerian Communica tions Commission (NCC) has said it is set for the second trial of 5G in Nigeria.

According to the Commission, the trial which is scheduled to hold on Thursday is necessary in order to validate the national policy on 5G for the digital economy.

The Commission added that the supervised trial would be conducted by Airtel Networks Limited and its Original Equipment Manufacturer on Thursday.

MTN Nigeria Communications had held the first 5G trial in Nigeria in 2019.

In its ‘Draft Consultation Document for Deployment of Fifth Generation (5G) Mobile Technology in Nigeria,’ the NCC disclosed that six locations across the nation were selected for this trial.

The locations included Abuja, Calabar, Lagos, Kano, Abeokuta, and Ibadan.

According to the NCC, the key parameters it was looking out for included: Throughput, latency and jitter measurements; Co-channel interference impact on QoS; Handover performance between access points (as applicable); Type/models of 5G terminals used for the test; Types of services (voice, data, video, etc.) and; Health and safety (EMF radiation level).

During the 2019 trials, the NCC disclosed that a 2GB movie was downloaded within 17 secs on 5G (using 26GHz) and 5mins on 4G network (using 3.5GHz) with a maximum download throughput of 1.7Gbps and 70Mbps respectively in Abuja.