Today China Mobile announced the commercial launch of 5G-Advanced – aka 5.5G or 5GA. And the first phones to support the improved networking standard are closer than you may think – Pete Lau, who is serving as the Chief Product Officer at Oppo, posted a teaser showing the Oppo Find X7 Ultra with “5GA” showing its status bar.
The Oppo Find X7 series is the first with 5.5G support
There’s also a post on Weibo on the matter, which suggests that the vanilla Oppo Find X7 should be updated with 5.5G connectivity too. That is interesting as they use different chipsets – Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 for the Ultra and Dimensity 9300 for the vanilla model. This makes the Find X7 duo the first phones to support 5.5G.
However, the number is expected to grow to over 20 compatible devices in a year’s time. China Mobile plans to roll out the new network to cover over 300 cities by the end of this year. The first 100 will include the massive metropolitan areas of Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou.
The 5G-Advanced network promises to be 300% faster, hitting speeds of up to 10Gbps down and 1Gbps up. China Mobile has already set up demonstration areas around the country, so owners of a Find X7 could try it out.
3GPP Release 18 details, aka 5G-Advanced
Anyway, 5G-Advanced is a marketing name for 3GPP Release 18. This includes “non-terrestrial networks”, i.e. using satellites as network cells, which might be related to the recent teaser that an Oppo Find X7 Ultra with satellite communication is on the way. That appears to be a new device, however, and not just a firmware update to the current models like the addition of 5.5G support for China Mobile’s network.
Source 1 | Source 2 (in Chinese) | Via
