Huawei and Proximus, Belgium's mobile telecommunications company, on Monday announced that they have successfully completed a live demonstration of a 1.1Gbps peak connection speed on a Live Mobile Network. It is a first for Belgium thanks to the Huawei 4.5G platform and results from the innovation partnership that was announced in 2015 between Proximus and Huawei.

Reaching speeds 8 times faster than the 150 Mbps peak rate of 4G, this achievement also represents an overall improvement in the peak rate, capacity, and cell edge throughput. As such, it opens the way for future types of terminals and services such as 2K and 4K video, virtual reality, augmented reality, and other services which require gigabit connections provided by 4.5G to offer users a truly immersive experience. With its aim to support larger bandwidths, reduced latencies, and massive connections, 4.5G lays a solid foundation for 5G commercialization along the LTE evolution path, while also making a soft transition from 4G.

"At Proximus, we believe the abundance of applications will require higher network performance in terms of speed, latency, and number of simultaneous connections. Just look at all the applications in advanced telemedicine, connected cars, or the all-pervasive media. In a world where everything will be connected, we want to continue offering the best mobile user experience, and we are delighted with the successful testing of 4.5G technology with our partner Huawei," said Geert Standaert, Chief Technology Officer at Proximus.

“Huawei enable partnerships through innovation; together we build next generation networks ensuring the best user experience towards end users. This trial is testimony of Huawei’s engagement to delivering highly innovative solutions & services to the Belgian market, but most importantly, it constitutes a first step to the establishment of the Digital Agenda for Belgium as set forward by Minister Alexander De Croo, in which Huawei will continuously be a major contributor as a key collaborative partner of the ICT industry,” Pedro Ferreira, CEO, Huawei Technologies Belgium.

With this perspective, Huawei and Proximus have conducted this joint demo on Huawei’s 4.5G platform, ‘LTE Advance Pro’. The trial combined Proximus’ 60MHz frequency spectrum across the 2600MHz, 2100MHz, 1800MHz and 800MHz bands to deliver 1.1Gbps. Indeed, as smartphones, wearables, connected cars, and other IoT applications are developing at an increasing pace, driving the need for higher speeds, more connections and next to no latency, the telecommunications industry will have to be ready to cope with these increasing demands.

As such, this demo could constitute a first step towards taking the 1Gbps mobile video experience across the whole of Belgium, though it would still necessitate further buildout of the network.