In many emerging markets, operators are hoping for a leapfrog effect in some urban areas where 4G has not been deployed to the full extent. In Uganda, MTN is claiming the first demonstration of 5G Standalone in a commercial network, working with ZTE. The demo was run in conjunction with Experience the Future Together event in capital Kampala, and achieved speeds of almost 1.5Gbps for several applications, including real time communication to an onsite bionic robot over fixed wireless connections, and a cloud VR (virtual reality) use case. The test network ran on ZTE 5G RAN and core, with a full 5G core network that featured total control/user plane separation (CUPS). Other ZTE technologies on show in the demo were…