14 June 2017, Shenzhen, China – ZTE Corporation (0763.HK / 000063.SZ), a major international provider of telecommunications, enterprise and consumer technology solutions for the Mobile Internet, and China Mobile Quanzhou Branch today announced they completed the commercial deployment of 3D-multiple input multiple output (MIMO) (namely, Pre5G Massive MIMO) in Quanzhou. With 16 commercial terminals connected, the single-carrier downlink peak cell rate increased to 730 Mbps and for the first time, the single-carrier 16-stream downlink peak rate of 3D-MIMO reached 700 Mbps, with the three-carrier rate up to 2.1 Gbps. This rate once again hit a record in the commercial environment as the three-carrier eight-stream downlink rate of commercial 3D-MIMO reached 1 Gbps following the joint efforts of ZTE and China Mobile.

Due to a boom in mobile Internet, video services account for an increasingly large share in 4G+ networks. By using the key 5G technology, Massive MIMO, on the same bandwidth, 3D-MIMO base stations achieve a peak throughput seven times higher than existing 4G macro stations, greatly enhancing user experience and guaranteeing big video transmission. Quanzhou Mobile and ZTE conducted the commercial deployment of 3D-MIMO in big video environments and verified the peak cell rate, which will be an important milestone in the commercialisation process of Massive MIMO technology. Moving forwards, both partners will continue to deepen their cooperation to expand the 5G-like Internet experience to a larger pool of users, and therefore herald the arrival of the big video era.

Since 2015, CMCC and ZTE have been investing in innovation and verification of 3D-MIMO technology. In 2016, 3D-MIMO pre-commercial verification was conducted in 50 cities of 29 provinces. The new-generation 3D-MIMO product features commercial sophistication and is suitable for engineering installation in macrocell coverage and hotspot scenarios. This product supports multiple bands (3.5 GHz, 2.6 GHz, and 2.3 GHz), multiple carriers, and multiple bandwidths, and can be seamlessly integrated with existing networks.

ZTE was the first to propose Pre5G technology concepts and a series of related solutions in 2016. ZTE provides 5G-like performance and service experience on 4G networks, paving the way to a comprehensive evolution from 4G to 5G. As a transitional solution for this evolution to 5G, Pre5G enhances the system capacity by six times, the average user bandwidth by five times, and the number of connections per unit area by 100 times compared with 4G.

ZTE Pre5G involves not only the application of key 5G technologies (such as Massive MIMO) with commercial availability on 4G networks, but also the enhancement of the long term evolution advanced (LTE-A) Pro technologies in 3GPP architecture, such as massive carrier aggregation (CA), unified delivery network (UDN), 256QAM, licensed assisted access (LAA), LWA(LTE and WLAN Aggregation), and NarrowBand IoT (NB-IoT). ZTE’s Pre5G implements a smooth evolution based on existing 4G networks, effectively lowers network construction cost, and supports rapid deployment, dramatically increasing the cost–performance ratio. In terms of the Giga+ MBB, massive IoT, and network cloudization, a combination of different technologies can be used to help operators fully upgrade network capacity from 4G to 5G. ZTE’s Pre5G has been highly recognised in the industry. As of now,  ZTE Pre5G-related products and solutions have been deployed on more than 60 networks in 40 countries, including China, Japan, Austria, Singapore, Spain, Malaysia, Thailand, and Indonesia.