Celcom Axiata, the third largest operator in Malaysia, and Swedish equipment vendor Ericsson announced they achieved a peak throughput of 18Gb/s on the 28GHz band in a pre-standard 5G trial.

The companies, claiming the first 5G trial in the country, signed a joint partnership agreement covering 5G and IoT technologies in February at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

Celcom Axiata, with a 25 per cent market share, recently announced its “journey to 5G” will involve the deployment of key technologies including 4×4 multiple-input, multiple-output (MIMO), and 256 QAM (quadrature amplitude modulation) to provide users with data speeds up to 400Mb/s.

Michael Kuehner, Celcom Axiata CEO, said 5G is important because it will help the operator meet the communication needs of consumers and the digitisation of various industries: “It is critical we explore this new generation technology and its capabilities with global partners like Ericsson.”

The CEO said Celcom will soon deploy an IoT network to enable digital and connected living services.

Ericsson in 2016 set up a 5G innovation centre with Universiti Teknologi Malaysia.