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 Review of ZTE’s LTE Development

From 2G, 3G to 4G, also from the terminal, the equipment to the services, ZTE has been leading the industry of communication technologies and provided integrated solutions to global operators. In 2005, ZTE started tracking and standardizing LTE technology and actively participated in LTE standardization efforts at organizations like 3GPP.

So far, ZTE has joined more than 40 standard organizations, alliances and forums, actively participated in the discussion and drafting of standards at ITU, 3GPP, 3GPP2, IEEE, OMA and other organizations, and submitted over 1,800 proposals to 3GPP covering wireless air interface, RAN and CN, of which, more than 500 proposals have been adopted by 3GPP. In addition, ZTE possesses 8 rapporteur seats in 3GPP. As of September 2009, ZTE had submitted to 3GPP a total of more than 1,500 proposals on LTE/SAE. In December 2006, ZTE became one of the first equipment vendors to join Next General Mobile Network (NGMN), and in October 2007, ZTE became one of the first equipment vendors to join LTE/SAE Trial Initiative (LSTI). ZTE has been actively promoting the LTE industry development.

With years of technology accumulation in the field of wireless broadband, ZTE ensures that its LTE products have a high technical level and can rapidly achieve technical convergence and be put into commercial use. Currently, ZTE has established R&D centers in Xi’an, Shenzhen, Shanghai, Nanjing, the United States, Europe and other places. Over 2,000 engineers are devoted to LTE research and development.

ZTE actively communicates and cooperates with the world’s leading operators to jointly make product planning and push forward LTE industrialization. The LTE series products currently under its research cover FDD LTE and TDD LTE, including macro base stations, distributed base stations, core network equipment, unified network management, service products and terminal products, meeting various needs of the market. Meanwhile, ZTE keeps on innovating LTE terminals, investing a great amount of R&D resources in them. Now, it has mastered core technologies of LTE terminals and possessed many core patents, capable of providing LTE terminals compatible with several standards. As a vendor of both network equipment and terminals, ZTE is committed to developing the LTE industrial chain. 

ZTE LTE products enjoy leading performance, with a single cell providing data rates of up to 150Mbps on the downlink and 50Mbps on the uplink, thus allowing many mobile phone users to enjoy high-speed data services in dense traffic urban areas while reducing the TCO of network construction. Under the single-mode LTE, the output power of a RRU can reach 2 × 40W. The base station platform adopts high efficiency power amplifier, capable of saving 40% energy consumption. The SDR base stations can save 70% TCO compared with traditional base stations.

ZTE’s SDR technology enables the evolution and upgrade from WCDMA, CDMA2000, TD-SCDMA to LTE based on the same unified hardware platform. With this technology, multi-standard wireless communications systems can coexist on the same hardware platform and the network can be flexibly deployed. 

ZTE is the first one in the industry to adopt, in its wireless products, the advanced MicroTCA platform, which boasts such outstanding advantages as multi-standard, multi-module, high performance, high reliability and low-cost. The evolution to LTE simply requires adding the LTE BP board, and the hardware structures, control and access modules can be reused, reducing costs to the maximum.

ZTE’s wireless solution Uni-RAN provides a unified, integrated and evolving wireless access network. Through a unified platform structure, it provides a unified SDR base station solution, unified RNC/BSC platform solution and unified network management solution to meet the current multi-band and multi-standard convergence requirement and realize a smooth evolution to the next generation technologies. At the same time, the network structure can be simplified and the TCO can be effectively reduced.

ZTE began to design and develop LTE system in 2007; launched LTE prototype  in early 2008; launched LTE test prototype and participated in testing and trials hosted by standard organizations and operators at the end of 2008; in 2009, ZTE made a phenomenal progress in the R&D and marketing of LTE and has entered partnerships with over 10 leading operators worldwide including Telstra’s CSL, Telefonica and SingTel.

In the Asia-Pacific region, ZTE is collaborating with CSL to build the world’s first dual-band LTE commercial trial network that supports LTE/UMTS dual-mode operation and will test LTE at the 2.6 GHz /1.8GHz dual bands in phases.

In Europe, ZTE received LTE testing permission from Telefonica and would do relevant LTE tests in Madrid. Moreover, ZTE signed a LTE trial agreement with Vodafone D2 in Germany. The two companies jointly conducted a GSM/LTE dual-mode demo and launched the LTE field test at the Digital Dividend (DD) band.

In China, ZTE was the first company to complete and pass the TD-LTE Phase II test with China Mobile; ZTE became the only vendor to use pre-business Evolved Packet Core (EPC) to complete the total system tests. As an industry first to use third party UE to complete the tests, ZTE achieved its expected results, including zero fault, zero malfunction and 100% connection rate. This TD-LTE test also makes ZTE the first company to complete a performance test under a 350Km/h high-speed mobile channel model, reaching the best theoretical value. With its excellent testing results, ZTE was selected to deploy TD-LTE indoor network for Expo 2010 in Shanghai

In October 2009, ZTE signed trial agreement with Etisalat, the largest international operator in the Middle East. And in November, ZTE was invited by SingTel, a leading multinational operator in the Asia-Pacific region, to participate in the united LTE test. The trials, which are scheduled to commence in the first half of 2010, will take place over a period of six to nine months.

In June 2009, Gartner released “Scorecard for Vendors of LTE Network Infrastructure” and graded the products and services of 10 existing LTE vendors in the following seven areas including market understanding, offering/product strategy, geographic strategy, sales and marketing strategy, market responsiveness and track record, and overall viability to reflect the comprehensive strength of each vendor in LTE, and with its continuous investments in the field of LTE and good performance, ZTE ranked third globally.

With the aim of becoming one of the leading manufacturers of LTE, ZTE will continue to invest in LTE, contribute to the development of next generation network together with global operators, and play a dominant role in next generation network construction.