LTE Deployment Strategy of China Mobile

Last year, China Mobile built the largest network in the world. We deployed 700,000 base stations, released more than 1000 TDD-LTE devices and have 100 million subscribers. Based on this, the average monthly data usage of our 4G subscribers has increased by 3.8 times. How do we do this? We have developed a comprehensive solution to provide indoor and outdoor coverage in shopping malls even on high-speed trains. And also terminal has matured rapidly.

Strategy for an Excellent Network

4G Network Strategy

We hope to continue to build our excellent network. We need to introduce advanced technologies such as carrier aggregation, higher-order MIMO and higher-order modulation, step by step to increase capacity. We will introduce VoLTE this year and improve the efficiency of our voice solutions. Then we can transfer our GSM network subscribers over to our 4G network. Then it enables us to quickly re-farm our GSM network spectrum for the development of FDD LTE network. Then we have a converged LTE network. It can also make our network very simple, and we can only have one network. The optimization and maintenance will be very simple. We hope to make our network a smart pipe rather than a dumb pipe. We want to provide differentiated services to our subscribers and also optimize different services. Then we can offer the best user experience to our subscribers. For further evolution, we hope to introduce network function virtualization to our core networks and quickly introduce new features.

4G Device Strategy

We believe that devices are very important for the success of 4G. We hope to balance the development of different types of terminals including high-end, medium and low-end. We also hope to reduce the cost of smart phones.

4G Service Strategy

We offer our subscribers converged communication services, which include new calls, new messages and new contacts. Currently, we are working with our partners to promote the development of native and APP modes to support our convergent communication.

Enablers for an Excellent Network

This year, our target is deployment of one million base stations in our network, 250 million subscribers, 100% roaming with LTE operators globally, and 200 million devices sales volume. To achieve this, there are many technologies that we will introduce into our network step by step. Now I would like to discuss some directions in the near future.

Carrier Aggregation

If you have carrier aggregation, you can use more spectrums to serve one user. Then you can greatly increase the user’s data rate. 

Small Cell

Small cell is a very flexible solution for us. At China Mobile, we have deployed a very large number of Wi-Fi APs. We can make full use of such Wi-Fi network infrastructure and deploy our small cells very quickly. We cooperate with our partners to define small-cell products, called “nanocell” products, which combine Wi-Fi APs with the small-cell base station. They share the same backhaul and power supply, so we can deploy very fast based on our Wi-Fi network. This year we will deploy 10,000 small cells. In near future, this number will be even larger.

3D MIMO

Since the standardization of TDD-LTE, MIMO has been a key technology for LTE. In China Mobile’s network, we have introduced 1-layer beam forming, 2-layer beam forming, and even 8-layer beam forming. Recently, we also introduced coordinated multi-site beam forming, called CoMP.

Our next step is 3D MIMO, which is the same as massive MIMO mentioned by Dr. Xiang from ZTE at the beginning of the forum. We believe that 3D MIMO is a better term for such technology because it can catch the feature of such a deployment. 

I’d like to thank ZTE, Huawei and our other partners very much. We have finished trialing our pre-commercial 3D MIMO products in our networks and found that throughput tripled. It’s very helpful in enlarging the capacity of network and also making full use of the spectrum. 

TDD/FDD Convergent Network

We are working on TDD-FDD convergent networking. For China Mobile, we have both TDD spectrum and FDD spectrum. We hope in the future we can refarm our FDD spectrum and build the FDD-TDD convergent network in China. We can just thank 3GPP for the standardization of convergence between TDD and FDD. You can have seamless handover between the TDD and FDD. You can also have load balance between the TDD and FDD carriers. Finally, you can have some joint operation between the TDD and FDD carriers. For example, you can support carrier aggregation between the TDD and FDD spectrum.

From an industry perspective, the network infrastructure and devices are ready for the Phase I and Phase II’s convergent networking. Next, we need to do more work together with the whole industry, and try to make joint operation of TDD-FDD mature as early as possible. Also there are already 18 operators at GTI who have built the FDD-TDD convergent networks, which give us very good demonstration on the capability of TDD-FDD convergent network.

Mobile Edge Computing

Mobile edge computing incorporates storage and computing capability into the base station. Then on the base station, you can optimize the radio application for transmission over the air. You can also provide the location-based services based on big data analysis, especially user behavior.

SON

We also try to introduce more advanced SON features, which enable easy and low-cost network deployment and smart maintenance.

Currently, we have self-configuration, self-running, PCI self-optimization. And we also have ANR and MRO. Now we are working on MDT and eMDT, which will make our network optimization and trouble-shooting automatic. 

Summary