A European research consortium conducted 5G network tests that achieved speeds of up to 5 Gbps, officials announced this month.

Researchers from the University of Kent in southeastern England led the tests, which were conducted at the headquarters of Telekom Slovenije in Ljubljana.

Both the university and Slovenian carrier are members of the iCIRRUS Project — or “intelligent converged network consolidating radio and optical access around user equipment” — funded by the EU’s Horizon 2020 program.

The project previously developed a mobile network utilizing Ethernet fronthaul, which received signals at the antennas and sent them to fixed base station terminals. During the latest tests, researchers demonstrated 100 Gbps transfer rates in the fronthaul network and delivered speeds of up to 5 Gbps to end user devices.

The test, Kent’s Dan Worth wrote, showed that the system “is able to comfortably handle the huge amount of data being received at the fronthaul network before passing it to fixed backhaul fiber networks.”

He added that it could also be tailored to be compatible with existing 4G networks.