Kuala Lumpur and Singapore, 5 October 2020 – Malaysia’s U Mobile and Singapore’s StarHub today announced that they have successfully completed a multi-party roaming video conference call over 5G standalone (5G SA) technology – completely independent of 4G, as part of trials to pave the way for consumers and businesses to enjoy crystal-clear and lag-free communication and entertainment experiences no matter where they are in the world.

The companies achieved this significant industry milestone by organising a super-clear and lag-free 5G video conference among four roaming users – two with U Mobile SIM cards in Singapore and another two with StarHub SIM cards in Malaysia. The video call was conducted via popular messaging apps on 5G-capable test phones for U Mobile users and commercially available 5G-capable phones for StarHub users.

At the same time the companies ran a series of cross-border speed and ping tests, achieving download speeds of over 1.3Gbps and latency of under 5ms on average – up to 10 times faster when compared to existing 4G technologies.

U Mobile’s Chief Technology Officer Woon Ooi Yuen shared, “U Mobile is excited to have completed this significant 5G SA roaming trial with StarHub. As this is the one of the first of its kind trial in the world, the key learnings received will be extremely beneficial and it will be applied to accelerate the roll out and take up of 5G roaming services in Malaysia and Singapore once 5G becomes commercially available in both countries. When it is eventually commercially launched, 5G SA roaming will enhance cross-border connectivity needs between both countries especially for business communities and those who regularly commute between both sides of the border.”

StarHub’s Chief Technology Officer Chong Siew Loong said, “At StarHub, bringing new and customer-focused innovation has always been our priority. First to unleash 5G non-standalone services for Singapore consumers and businesses last month, we are now delighted to have crossed another major 5G milestone with U Mobile in the journey towards 5G SA commercialisation in both countries. Our successful 5G SA trial with U Mobile is an exciting prelude to how 5G will enable everyone and everything to enjoy closer connections, remote collaboration and productivity boosts and unified communications wherever they are.”

Having gleaned important performance insights from the 5G SA cross-border trial, the network teams from both companies will continue to collaborate to establish the right network configurations and settings for customers to enjoy the best 5G roaming experience when 5G rolls out commercially in both countries. The cross-border tests were conducted on trial 5G SA network infrastructure. In Singapore, the tests were done on trial 3.5GHz spectrum granted by the Infocomm Media Development Authority. In Malaysia, the tests were done using 100MHz C-band spectrum, via Apparatus Assignment by the Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission. U Mobile’s technology partner for this trial was Huawei.

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What is 5G SA?

The 5G Standalone (SA) network is not supported and totally independent of 4G infrastructure. The advantage of Standalone is easier and better efficiency, which will reduce the cost of the devices, and improve performance in data throughput up to the border of the network, while also helping development of wireless use cases such as ultra-reliable low latency communications (URLLC). 5G SA network supports all major use case scenarios.