ZTE and China Mobile Quanzhou Branch announced that they have completed the commercial deployment of 3D-MIMO, also termed Pre5G Massive MIMO in the city of Quanzhou in Fujian province.
ZTE stated that with 16 commercial terminals connected, the single-carrier downlink peak cell rate has been increased to 730 Mbit/s, with a single-carrier 16-stream downlink peak rate using 3D-MIMO of up to 700 Mbit/s achieved. In addition, a three-carrier rate of up to 2.1 Gbit/s was achieved. ZTE claims that these speeds mark a record for a commercial environment, and build on three-carrier, 8-stream downlink rate with 3D-MIMO of 1 Gbit/s, also working with China Mobile.
ZTE explained that using the key 5G technology massive MIMO on the same bandwidth, 3D-MIMO base stations are able to deliver a peak throughput 7x higher than existing 4G macro stations, enhancing services and enabling reliable video transmission.
Quanzhou Mobile and ZTE noted that they have commercially deployed 3D-MIMO in ‘big video’ environments and verified the peak cell rate, representing a milestone towards the commercialisation of massive MIMO technology. The partners plan to continue to work together to expand the 5G-like Internet experience to more end users.
China Mobile and ZTE stated that they have been jointly developing and verifying 3D-MIMO technology since 2015, and in 2016 conducted 3D-MIMO pre-commercial verification in 50 cities across 29 provinces of China. The new-generation 3D-MIMO product is claimed to be suitable for engineering installation in macrocell and hotspot scenarios. The product provides support for multiple bands (3.5, 2.6 and 2.3 GHz), multiple carriers and multiple bandwidths and can be integrated with existing networks.
ZTE’s Pre5G strategy is based on applying key 5G technologies such as massive MIMO to existing commercial 4G networks, as well as the enhancement of LTE-A Pro technologies within a 3GPP architecture via technology such as carrier aggregation (CA), unified delivery network (UDN), 256QAM, licensed assisted access (LAA), LWA (LTE and WLAN aggregation) and NarrowBand IoT (NB-IoT). ZTE claims that to date its Pre5G-related solutions have been deployed on over 60 networks in 40 countries.
