According to the company, it used New Radio Dual Connectivity (NR-DC) technology to combine mmWave and mid-band 5G spectrums to achieve that speed. It aggregated 800MHz of mmWave spectrum and 100MHz of mid-band spectrum. Samsung conducted this speed test in its lab in Plano, Texas. The test was conducted using its fully-virtualized RAN and Core, mmWave 5G Compact Macro, and Massive MIMO (multiple-input multiple-output) radio. The latter featured 256 Quadrature Amplitude Modulation (QAM) technology. 256QAM allowed for enhanced performance, with download speeds seeing a boost of over 30 percent compared to 64QAM. The test device is which Samsung achieved 8.08Gbps download speeds featured Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X65 5G Modem-RF System.
Samsung and Qualcomm hit a new milestone in 5G download speeds
It’s been almost three years since 5G technology first became available to consumers. But the next-gen wireless connectivity standard is still seen as a new development in mobile technology. Perhaps because 5G isn’t yet available widely all over the world. The majority of smartphone users globally still don’t have access to it. And it could take a few more years before 5G becomes ubiquitous. Meanwhile, the likes of Samsung are continuously pushing the limits of 5G. The company’s latest milestone in 5G download speeds was preceded by another milestone achievement in upload speeds last October. The Korean giant, together with Verizon and Qualcomm, reached upload speeds of 711Mbps in a lab trial using aggregated bands of mmWave spectrum. If you look back at the numbers for previous years, another breakthrough is imminent. In March last year, Samsung combined 40MHz of 4G frequency and 800MHz of mmWave 5G frequency to achieve then-high download speeds of 5.23Gbps. That tops the speeds of 4.3Gbps, 2.65Gbps, and 1.7Gbps recorded in 2020, 2019, and 2018 respectively. So the latest milestone of 8.08Gbps 5G download speeds hints at a continuous improvement. As Samsung says, this progress “opens up new possibilities for 5G use cases” in 2022 and beyond. “Samsung looks forward to harnessing the full potential of 5G through new breakthroughs that will bring truly transformative benefits to people around the world and across the enterprise landscape,” the company’s Executive Vice President of Networks Business Junehee Lee had said back in October 2021.
