Sri Lanka’s Dialog announce live transmission of South Asia’s first 5G pilot

Jan 01, 2019 (LBO) - Dialog Axiata announced the commissioning of South Asia’s first fully functional and standards compliant 5G transmission using commercial grade base stations and end user devices. Dialog’s pre-commercial 5G transmission was enabled in collaboration with the Telecommunications Regulatory Commission of Sri Lanka (TRCSL) who has lead the region in making available spectrum in the 3.5GHz band for the piloting of pre-commercial 5G services. Dialog’s pilot 5G transmission delivers speeds in excess of 2 GBps in a real-world setting including base stations installed and commercial grade 5G Home Gateway Routers, which can deliver 5G throughput to a host of wireless devices and applications across the spheres of video, gaming and automation. 5G technology is designed to deliver an era of ‘Intelligent Connectivity’, bringing together the power of 2GBps + transmission speeds alongside cutting-edge technologies such as Augmented and Virtual Reality, Robotics, Autonomous Vehicles, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning based applications and cloud based Enterprise Networks. 5G networks will augment 4G services with fundamental advancements with respect to network speeds, throughput, traffic capacity and ultra-low latency. Director General, TRCSL, P.R.S.P. Jayatilake in congratulating Dialog on embarking on the bold initiative of setting up a pre-commercial 5G transmission said, “Sri Lanka has consistently led the South Asia region in technology introduction. The TRCSL is very proud to note the achievements of the mobile sector in delivering broadband services to Sri Lankan consumers on a very affordable basis – this along with wider availability has driven broadband penetration in Sri Lanka”. Supun Weerasinghe, Group Chief Executive, Dialog Axiata PLC said, “Reaching the milestone of enabling a fully functional pre-commercial 5G transmission as well as our investments in making a major part of our expansive island-wide 4G network fully 5G compliant, demonstrate our commitment to deliver to our customers, network capability and digital enablement on par with the most developed markets in the world.