Vodafone has announced it will test 5G services between October and December 2018 in Birmingham, Bristol, Cardiff, Glasgow, Liverpool, London and Manchester. The company says its engineers are working across 40 sites in these 7 locations and is talking to enterprise customers to test services.
Vodafone won the largest block of 5G spectrum in the auctions, and says it will launch 5G commercially in 2020.
The company already has an agreement with metro fibre provider Cityfibre to pass 1 million premises in Aberdeen, Coventry, Edinburgh, Huddersfield, Milton Keynes, Peterborough and Stirling.
Vodafone says both its 5G and Gigafast Broadband services will be connected by RedStream, its fully optical core network which links 1,300 broadband exchanges and 1,600 retail parks, new builds and business premises. Vodafone recently tested ‘photonic’ technology which it says will enable data to be carried over the core network at 400Gbit/s.
