ZTE Corporation along with Telenet from Belgium have announced the first FDD Massive MIMO field trials in Europe. The field demonstration site was chosen in Werchter, Belgium, home of the Rock Werchter music festival. The demonstration used 20 MHz of spectrum and 6 terminals to complete an 12-stream verification, achieved an average single user speed of 120 Mbps, 710 Mbps peak cell speed, and improved spectrum efficiency by 3.3 times compared to traditional LTE base stations.
With the rapid growth of mobile broadband services, user data requirements have been increasing exponentially, but 4G spectrum limitations cause a bottleneck in network capacity improvement. Massive MIMO is a key 5G network technology, and the ZTE Pre5G core solution, introduces 5G capabilities into existing 4G networks. ZTE was the first vendor to make Massive MIMO technology available for all FDD-LTE networks, which account for 85 percent of the world’s LTE networks. It will help operators significantly increase network capacity without the requirement of costly additional spectrum. More importantly, the deployment of FDD Massive MIMO does not require changes to the existing 4G network architecture, and is fully compatible with current 4G terminals. This brings immediate commercial benefits to the operator while boosting the customer experience.
Telenet and ZTE have been in a long-term strategic partnership since 2016, and ZTE is the sole radio network vendor. Since ZTE launched the world’s first FDD Massive MIMO product in December 2016, the solution has rapidly gained recognition in the industry. Thus far, the company has cooperated with more than 10 operators in verifying and deploying FDD Massive MIMO solutions in China, Belgium, Thailand, Indonesia, Australia and more, including scaled commercial deployments with China Telecom and China Unicom. The ZTE FDD Massive MIMO solution will meet more extensive demands for higher spectrum efficiency and pave a new way to 5G evolution for 4G operators all over the world.
