Pre5G to be available much earlier than 5G, ZTE expert told delegates at International Workshop on 5G-ICT Technologies conference in Beijing 

10 November 2014, Shenzhen, China – ZTE Corporation (“ZTE”) (H share stock code: 0763.HK / A share stock code: 000063.SZ), a publicly-listed global provider of telecommunications equipment, network solutions and mobile devices, provided further updates on the company’s vision on pre5G at a high-level international meeting of experts and industry officials to discuss global development of 5G technology.

In an address to the International Workshop on 5G-ICT Technologies conference in Beijing, Dr. Xiang Jiying, Chief Technology Officer of Wireless Products of ZTE, said pre5G will become available much earlier than 5G and deliver user experience comparable to 5G, offering high throughput and low latency. Pre5G will utilize some key 5G technologies, whilst being provisioned on existing 4G UE (user equipment), Dr. Xiang told delegates at the conference.

"Even though the industry is still working on 5G standardization, we already have a lot of clarity on 5G user experience and the 5G candidate technologies,” Dr. Xiang said. “Therefore, pre5G can be defined and implemented even before 5G becomes standardized.

The International Workshop on 5G-ICT Technologies conference, hosted by the Future Mobile Communications Forum, was attended by experts from companies including China Mobile, China Telecom, China Unicom, Qualcomm and Intel, in addition to Mr. Cao Jianlin, Vice Minister of Ministry of Science and Technology, Madam Dai Xiaohui, Deputy Director-General of Department of Science and Technology of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, and Mr. Philipp Barth, Head of CONNECT Section - Communications Networks, Content & Technology Delegation of the European Union to China and Mongolia. ZTE’s Dr. Zhu Fusheng, member of 5G General Expert Group of National 863 Plan was one of the chairmen of the conference.　

As a global leading supplier of wireless communications solutions, ZTE has put lots of effort into 5G research and development, and has been making breakthroughs and innovations in researches on key 5G technologies. Massive MIMO has been recognized as a 5G technology in the industry. Currently, ZTE has been developing pre-commercial Massive MIMO products without modifying the legacy 4G air interface, thus Massive MIMO has become an important part of pre5G. ZTE has proposed the Virtual Cell technology for evolution from Cloud Radio to the Ultra Dense Network (UDN), which effectively solves the problem of cell-edge interference in 4G networks. The Multi-User Shared Access (MUSA) technology proposed by ZTE improves network capacity significantly, with reasonable complexity. The coding-based design greatly enlarges the number of users accessed simultaneously, and SIC receivers are used so no synchronization is required between users, which is particularly useful for prolonging terminal battery life. Therefore, uplink MUSA is suitable good candidate for Machine Type Communications (MTC). In addition, ZTE has been investing heavily in 4G vector processing chips for several years, which have an extensible software architecture and strong processing capacity and can meet pre5G requirements by just modifying instruction sets rather than changing the hardware.

ZTE is a major contributor and participant in researches on global 5G standards. As a major member of the IMT-2020 (5G) Promotion Group, ZTE leads some important researches, such as IEEE-oriented 5G technologies, 5G network architecture, and breakthrough technologies for the physical layer of 5G networks. ZTE has established partnerships and alliances on research and innovation with many high-end customers worldwide in customer requirements, scenario study, new service applications, and network architecture innovation, striving to develop the most suitable solutions for end users.