The race to 5G in the Philippines is on. Globe Telecom today announced that it will start offering 5G services in 2019, one of the first carriers in the world to do so.
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5G, of course, is the next-generation network technology that performs as much as 100 times faster than 4G. Worldwide commercial launch is set for 2020, but as early as this year, telecommunications companies such as the United States’ Verizon Communications and AT&T are planning to deploy the network.
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Globe president and CEO Ernest Cu said that they will provide their first 5G offer by the second quarter of 2019 to help improve the state of the internet in the Philippines. It will be adopted through their fixed wireless-broadband service Globe At Home and is expected to provide lower latency, better capacity, and download speed that rivals fiber internet connection. In a live demo to the media, the download speed reached 2.07Gbps.
GLOBE 5G Speedtest ???#Globe5GPH pic.twitter.com/U1YpXuP3kB
— Bernard Magcarang (@bmagcarang) June 6, 2018
5G will also allow Globe to capitalize on Air Fiber internet when deploying fixed wireless broadband. Air Fiber, which makes use of fixed location wireless radio instead of fiber, could provide speeds ranging from 50Mbps to 100Mbps.
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According to Cu, vendor partners like Huawei Technologies have helped them prepare for the rollout of 5G since 2016. They use Massive MIMO or multiple-input and multiple-output, a fundamental radio access technology for the network.
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Cu added that thanks to 5G, they can bring internet to more homes, as they can skip the long approval process of deploying a fiber optic cable. The latter still requires multiple permits from local government units.
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