Qualcomm and ZTE claim their recent demonstration of 5G Standalone (SA) coverage in two lower bands, conducted with Three Austria, will encourage deployment of 5G in rural and less densely populated suburban areas. The demo also exemplifies ZTE’s continued involvement in 5G in a number of countries that are under pressure to sanction Chinese technology firms, to a greater extent than its bigger rival Huawei. The main point was that, with help from Qualcomm, ZTE demonstrated 5G SA using the 700 MHz (Band n28) and 1.4 GHz (Band n75) bands, over Drei’s network. These are two out of 102 bands defined by 3GPP for 5G New Radio (NR) for both SA and non-standalone (NSA) 5G. They are narrower…