14 June 2022, Shenzhen, China - ZTE Corporation (0763.HK / 000063.SZ), a major international provider of telecommunications, enterprise and consumer technology solutions for the mobile internet, today announced that it has exclusively won the bidding for the 5G core network - location service bidding (LSB) project of China Broadcasting Network Co., Ltd (China Broadnet).

 ZTE will build two sites (active/standby) in Beijing and Nanjing for the national LBS platform of China Broadnet. Upon completion, the platform will provide all the users of China Broadnet with the location-based service (LBS), covering the whole network. 

Location-based service NEs (network elements) are essential for operators. In addition to emergency location service, they also provide commercial location applications for enterprise customers. In the 5G era, positioning requirements are shifting from 2C consumers to 2B industry verticals, and there are more 5G high-precision positioning requirements. 5G LBS will be widely used in industry scenarios such as factories, ports, mines, shopping malls, and hospitals. As communication and positioning are implemented in one network, the LBS, which is the basic capability of 5G network, has attracted more attention from major operators and become a powerful service for operators to occupy the 2B market.

The 5G iLBS integrated positioning platform provided by ZTE supports 4G networks and 5G networks at the same time, which can help operators save investment and simplify operation and maintenance. Through the standard API (application programming interface), the positioning capability of the platform can also help operators build an industry ecosystem.

In addition, ZTE’s 5G iLBS positioning platform can be flexibly deployed according to the customers’ requirements. It supports both unified deployment and distributed deployment of the whole network. At the early stage, the requirements for 5G positioning, with respect to positioning precision and latency, are not particularly high, and only one platform can be built nationwide to meet such requirements. However, for high-demanded scenarios such as enterprise parks, factories, mines, subways and hospitals nowadays, GMLC/LMF (Gateway Mobile Location Center/Location Management Function) can be integrated into 5GC private network or be deployed into the MEC (Mobile Edge Computing). Thus, sensitive data can be kept within the park and meter-level high-precision positioning can be implemented.

Moving forward, ZTE will actively assist China Broadnet in commercial deployment and construction of 5G networks. Both parties will be committed to accelerating the implementation and large-scale application of 5G LBS scenarios to jointly promote service development and build a commercial benchmark for the 5G LBS service.