Paris, July 3, 2018 - Bordeaux is officially the first city in France to host a 5G pilot site. Bouygues Telecom has opened this morning the first 5G pilot site in France, from two base station antennas of their network, providing up to ten kilometers of coverage. Numerous communications technologies have been established over these two first sites equipped with 5G, illustrating new use cases that only 5G can provide:
- Remote control of vehicles,
- The simultaneous transmission of 10 live 4K video streams,
- Mobile telemedicine in augmented reality, with Nomadeec, the company's solution Bordeaux Exelus,
- Remote maintenance with the 5G Remote Expert application developed by HoloForge Interactive, holographic division of Asobo Studio for Bouygues Telecom.
Finally, a throughput test was performed with an observed downlink rate of 2.3 Gbps, amount of 260 MB/s and extremely low latency of 7.5 ms.
The equipment deployed is the first made available by hardware manufacturer Huawei and are similar to those that will be implemented in the actual deployment of 5G. Bouygues Telecom now has a network of 3GPP R15 NSA (Non Stand Alone) end-to-end with all 4G and 5G components: access, transport and core network. Many dozens of antennas will be added gradually to Bordeaux over the next few years . Other 5G Bouygues Telecom pilot programs will be established in several cities of France.
5G will become a reality in France from 2020 thanks to the network capacity that it will bring, necessary to deal with the considerable increase in French mobile traffic, currently doubling every year. The second step of 5G will represent a tremendous growth opportunity for businesses: very low latency, speed high standards and the reliability of data exchange will allow the development of new services that will be used by both companies and the general public. This second step should start gradually from 2023.
In order to quickly emerge new uses facilitated by 5G, the Bouygues Group today announced the creation of the SmartX_5G Accelerator, which is set to become the 5G ecosystem uniting all Bouygues group initiatives in this area.