Your Tech Story

5g connectivity

Airtel 5G

Airtel 5G service demonstration goes live in Hyderabad

On Thursday, Airtel gave a live demonstration of its 5G network in Hyderabad. The company claims that it is the first telecom service provider in India to successfully give a live demonstration of its 5G service. According to Airtel, the newly launched 5G network has the capability to operate over the existing network technology of both mid-bands and sub-GHz bands.

Yesterday, the company successfully operated both 5G and 4G concurrently over the existing liberalized spectrum in the 1800MHz band through the Non-Standalone (NSA) network technology. (Gadgets 360) Airtel 5G service will increase the speed of existing technology by 10 times with 10 times latency and 100 times concurrency. This will help in improving the overall user experience from attending online calls to downloading movies and TV shows.

More about Airtel 5G network

Airtel worked jointly with Ericsson, its equipment partner to bring this new experience to its users. The company has claimed that the 5G network has the capability to work over existing network technology hence can operate in mid-bands of range 1800MHz, 2100MHz, and 2300MHz. The 5G service will also operate in the sub-GHz band of frequency 800MHz and 900MHz.The existing Airtel users can use 5G services by software upgrades as said by the operator.

Airtel is now waiting for the permission from Department of Telecom (DoT) to deploy 5G services dynamically. As both the 4G and the 5G services can be operated through the same spectrum block, it will only take months for the company to make it available. Though the live service in Hyderabad was successful yesterday, Airtel didn’t mention any timeline about the commercial rollout of the 5G services. But, the CEO of Bharti Airtel mentioned that the company is waiting for government approvals. As soon as they have the permission and enough quantity of the right spectrum band, they will make the rollout of the Airtel 5G service.

Gopal Vittal, MD, and CEO of Bharti Airtel said that made a comment that India has the potential to become the global center for innovations in 5G technology. He further said that to build a strong 5G ecosystem all the devices, applications, and network innovation should come together.

Demonstration of Airtel 5G service

Airtel carried out the 5G demonstration in Oppo Reno 5 Pro and Oppo Find X2 Pro. The company claims that there are more than 20 different smartphones, 5 models, in India that are ready to use the Airtel 5G services. The existing users of Airtel don’t need to upgrade their sim cards for 5G usage unlike what we used to do earlier for changing sim cards to 3G or 4G network. Since both the 4G and 5G service can be provided from the same spectrum block, things have become a lot simpler and easier in the switching part. The live demonstration of the 5G network is only available in some selected stores in Hyderabad.

Airtel 5G
Image Source: gadgets.ndtv.com

Jio’s attempt to launch 5G in India

Apart from Bharti Airtel, its leading competitor in the Indian telecom market, Reliance Jio has also started testing its 5G services. Recently, the company has announced the advanced 5G testing it is carrying out this year. The company has also mentioned that very soon it will be bringing the 5G service of Reliance Jio in India probably this year itself. Though the operator has promised to test its 5G network at a scale, the company hasn’t announced a date yet for any live demonstrations like Airtel. It is very likely that Jio might roll out the 5G services in the second half of this year. In a recent statement made by Mukesh Ambani, Chairperson of Reliance Industries, he said that the company will make the 5G services available at an affordable rate everywhere in the country.

6 months notice period for 5G rollout

Previously, the Department of Telecom (DoT) has announced that any telecom service provider should give a one-year notice before launching any new technology using the seven frequency bands that will be up for auction. But, yesterday DoT reduced the one-year notice period to 6-months. For the auction of the seven frequency bands, the government has planned to put a rate of Rs 3.92 lakh crore.

Oxygen OS 11

Oxygen OS 11 rolling out for OnePlus 8 and 8 Pro Smartphone.

On 10th October 2020, OnePlus announced that the company will be rolling out Oxygen OS 11 for OnePlus 8 and OnePlus 8 Pro in India. The operating system Oxygen 11 is build based on stable Android 11 and this is for the first time the world is witnessing the fastest rollouts of Android 11 for a smartphone. With the launch of Oxygen OS 11 last week, and the scheduled launch of OnePlus 8T on 14th October, we can assume that OnePlus 8T will come with Oxygen OS 11.

In August of this year, the company launched the developer version of the OS followed by launching two open Betas for Oxygen OS 11 in September. Now, the stable version of the OS has been finally released which will also available for OnePlus 7T, OnePlus 7T Pro, OnePlus 7, OnePlus 7 Pro, OnePlus 6, OnePlus 6T, and OnePlus Nord in near future. The OS comes with many modified and new features and the company says that while installation the users must make sure the battery is a minimum of 30% in phone and storage of a minimum of 3GB is available.

Oxygen OS Features in the Beta 2 version

The Beta version of the Oxygen OS 11 was released in September and it came with a handful of new features. While releasing the Beta version of this OS, the company made many fixes for system optimization. Some of these fixes included repairing the black screen issue that the users face while clicking on the ‘Tips & Support’. Another major failure in the Beta one version of OS 11 is that it failed to activate Google Assistant in many situations which were fixed in this version. An ambient display feature was added to bring some chic style to your smartphone. This display feature was brand new and it is known as the ‘canvas’ feature which “can automatically draw a wireframe picture based on a lock screen photo on your phone”.

Before releasing the Open Beta 2, the HD icon was not centered on the call log and there were some issues with widgets not responding at times. They were all fixed in the new version. The company also fixed the system stability and optimized the power consumption for the latest 5G connectivity. Now, let’s have a look at the stable version of Oxygen OS 11 that rolled out last week.

Features of Oxygen OS 11

Oxygen OS 11
Image Source: gizchina.com
  • System Updates

Oxygen OS 11 comes with a brand new UI design so that the users get more comfortable using it. The company added a new weather UI that dynamically switches between sunrise and sunset. It has also improved efficiency and optimization for many third-party applications.

  • The Smart Display

A new feature, Always-on ambient Display has been added. All you have to do is go to Settings followed by Display and then turn on the Ambient Display. With the collaboration of Parsons School of Design, the new OS has added a new clock feature that changes according to the amount of data used. To enable this feature go to Settings followed by Customization and Clock Styles.

  • Modes for your different moods

With every application and OS eventually adding the dark mode, we are kind of getting addicted to it. So, the company has added a new shortcut to enable the dark mode in your phone. You can also enable the ‘turn on automatically’ feature that also helps in changing the mode from sunrise to sunset automatically. Apart from the dark mode, OnePlus also included 5 new themes under Zen mode. A group feature has been included in the Zen mode which allows you to invite friends and enable this mode together.

  • The Gaming arena

OnePlus has added three new ways of notification so that you have an uninterrupted gaming experience. The options are text-only, heads up, and block. Many new gaming tools have also been added for the Fnatic mode. A quick reply feature has also been added for Whatsapp and Instagram along with a mis-touch prevention feature.

Apart from all these new features, the gallery has also been optimized to create weekly videos automatically from saved pictures and videos. The image preview is also faster.

AT&T’s 5G Network will Go Live in 12 Cities by the End of this Week

AT&T has been prepping for the launch of its 5G network for a long time, followed by a conference early this month, in which it demoed the speed of its upcoming 5G network. After such a long wait, AT&T has announced that its 5G network will go live on 21 December, in some of the parts of 12 cities in the United States. AT&T has become the first company to launch a mobile network based on the 5G standard, although Verizon had also launched its first 5G network earlier this year, as a home broadband replacement.

5G-ATT
Images Source: GlobalMediaIT

Currently, the network is only available to a specific group of people. It’s not like you can go to a store and directly buy the hotspot from there. The company is mainly targetting to provide the service to the businesses in the area. There may be a strategy behind the idea, as the company might be still testing the network, and would want to assure that the service is working well before it goes out to more consumers. So the company is approaching the targeted clients by itself.

AT&T is offering a free 5G hotspot service to those companies, and won’t charge anything until the official launch. The company is planning to launch the network in the other parts of the world by the coming spring and will sell the hot spot for $499. It is also going to announce the monthly plan for the 5G network starting with $70 per month for 15GB.

The cities which have got the access to this 5G service are New Orleans, Charlotte, Atlanta, Raleigh, Houston, Indianapolis, Dallas, Louisville, Oklahoma City, San Antonio, Jacksonville, and Waco and the cities that may get access to the same service in the coming six months may include Nashville, Los Angeles, Orlando, Las Vegas, San Diego, San Johe and San Francisco. Even though AT&T will expand to those cities, here too, only some specific parts of those cities will be able to use the 5G network.

AT&T has also announced that it will launch two Samsung 5G phones in 2019, in the two halves of the year. The company is also offering tempting deals for the early subscribers of the 5G network along with free access to it for at least 90 days.

Qualcomm Announces new Flagship Chip featuring 5G connectivity

Qualcomm Snapdragon
Image Source: mybroadband.co

The world’s largest semiconductor and telecommunications equipment company Qualcomm has announced its new flagship processor, built on the 7-nanometer mode process. Noticeably, the Apple’s A12 processor and Huawei’s Kirin 980 processor are also built on the same technology. And now Qualcomm is also about to produce its own high-performance processor.

The processor is considered to be the Snapdragon 855, and Qualcomm has claimed that the processor will provide better speed, improved battery backup, and performance. The flagship chip is likely to be the first mobile platform that will be 5G-capable and will be implemented in the premium flagship smartphones when used with the Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X50. Although Snapdragon X50 5G modem is not new to the technical world, it will be used in a smartphone for the very first time. And, according to Qualcomm, it has already begun coupling the processor with OEMs developing next-generation consumer devices.

The President of Qualcomm Incorporated stated, “We are very pleased to be working with OEMs, operators, infrastructure vendors, and standards bodies across the world, and are on track to help launch the first 5G mobile hotspots by the end of 2018, and smartphones using our next-generation mobile platform in the first half of 2019.”

Qualcomm is already considered as a leader in 3G and 4G mobile technologies. Now this time it is coming with the 5G technology with its faster, smaller and power efficient Snapdragon 855 to be used with high-end smartphones.