ZTE Corporation, a major international provider of telecommunications, enterprise and consumer technology solutions for the mobile internet, and the Hunan Branch of China Telecom, with the support of Qualcomm Technologies have completed an end-to-end trial of the "Fusion Assisting Super TDD” (FAST) solution based on 2.1 GHz and 3.5 GHz on the commercial network of Changsha city. By flexibly aggregating three frequency carriers of 2.1 GHz and 3.5 GHz, the solution significantly improves 5G uplink/downlink throughput.
With the implementation of 5G commercialization strategies toward dual-band (2.1 GHz and 3.5 GHz) to achieve excellent widespread coverage and high capacity, the Hunan Branch of China Telecom keeps on exploring more efficient and in-depth spectrum harmonization solutions to guarantee better quality services and meet the growing demand of massive data capacity requirements of services, including HD video, online games, and AR/VR.
Based on CA (carrier aggregation) technology in 3GPP Rel-15 and the corresponding enhancement of 3GPP Rel-16, the FAST solution deeply coordinates multi-band multi-carrier in both uplink and downlink to boost system performance of capacity and coverage. The Hunan Branch of China Telecom deployed the FAST solution in its commercial network of Changsha city, bolstered with ZTE RAN system and a smartphone test device powered by Snapdragon X65 5G Modem-RF System, Qualcomm Technologies' 4th-generation 5G modem-to-antenna solution. The commercial trial of downlink 3CC CA of 2.1 GHz and 3.5 GHz with up to 240 MHz aggregation bandwidth achieves a maximum downlink data rate of 3.9 Gbps, increasing by 1.6 times on a 3.5 GHz single carrier network. In addition, with the feature of UL Tx Switching of Rel-16, Uplink Time Division Mode Carrier Aggregation (UL TDM CA) of 2.1 GHz and 3.5 GHz is enabled to boost uplink data rate up to 511 Mbps, an increase of about 38% on 3.5 GHz single carrier network. This trial shows that the FAST solution offers excellent spectrum harmonization for coverage and capacity both in downlink and uplink.
Moving forward, the Hunan Branch of China Telecom and ZTE will continue to work together to promote the in-depth integration of multi-band of 3.5 GHz and 2.1 GHz on a 5G commercial network with Qualcomm Technologies, so as to build an efficient and low-OPEX 5G network with top-quality and superior performance.
