TAMPERE, Finland — Finnish cell carrier Elisa claims to have launched world’s first commercial 5G network and said it is already selling 5G subscriptions for the new service, reports rcrwireless.com.
The 5G network was started in Tampere, Finland, and Tallinn, Estonia. (Elisa has over 2.8 million customers with 6.2 million subscriptions across those two countries.) The 5G hardware used in the first call on the network was provided by Chinese vendor Huawei.
In February Elisa performed a 5G test in Helsinki in partnership with Huawei, and during that test a 5G network was demonstrated in a moving car simultaneously with two 5G terminal devices. The test network Elisa built operated in the 3.5 GHz band, and reached download speeds of 1 Gbps and upload speeds of 400 Mbps, according to the same article.
In May Etisalat announced the launch of the first commercial 5G wireless network in the UAE becoming the first telecom operator in the Middle East and North Africa region to achieve this technological milestone, according to their press release. Etisalat “will be the first operator to have a fully developed commercial 5G network available to provide gigabit internet services to its customers.”
