2 September, 2021, 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 received a full score of 5 points for its QCell series products, ranking first in the industry, according to Enterprise Small-Cell CLA (competitive landscape assessment) report released by GlobalData, a leading market analysis organization. Also, the QCell series products are rated as "Leader" in both the comprehensive rating and all the subcategories.

Principal Analyst Ed Gubbins evaluated the small-cell solutions of the leading vendors in the industry from three dimensions: system capacity, radio form factors, and radio diversity:

System capacity: Solutions that offer high throughput and support for a high number of users assure operators that they can scale to meet rising capacity needs without requiring upgrades. Solutions that support multiple frequency bands simultaneously, or feature advanced antenna arrays, or a large number of radios per central unit, can also help boost capacity. 

Radio form factors: Solutions with comparatively compact and lightweight form factors are easier to deploy and aesthetically less obtrusive. 

Radio diversity: Solutions that support a broad range of radio unit options and capabilities are better able to meet a variety of market needs. These options could include support for different radio access technologies, spectrum bands – including unlicensed or shared spectrum – and power output levels in addition to Internet of Things capabilities. 

ZTE's QCell series products are highly competitive and have been fully recognized in the above three dimensions. According to Analysts’ core evaluation, ZTE's QCell series products are of “best-in-class, mature solutions, rich product portfolio, compact sizes and light weight, advanced features and high competitiveness”. 

ZTE has profound technical accumulation in the field of small cell. Based on its deep insight into the importance of indoor mobile communications, ZTE has been committed to the research of new active digital indoor coverage technologies since 2010, and in 2013, ZTE launched the world's first Ethernet active digital multi-mode indoor distributed small cell system---QCell, leading the transformation of indoor communications from passive analog to active digital.

In the 4G era, thanks to its powerful R&D capabilities, ZTE boasts such high-integration and large-capacity features of its QCell as multi-frequency, multi-mode, multi-channel and single Ethernet cable in the industry. In addition, the company has developed a series of products combining multi-frequency bands. Its Qcell has been widely used in the high-value indoor scenarios of many operators around the world, and has won many national and international awards. 

On the basis of 4G QCell, ZTE's 5G QCell maintains independent innovation. It evolves towards the all-optical architecture to satisfy the requirements for 5G large bandwidth, high performance and RAN sharing. Besides, ZTE's 5G QCell has the following advantages: 

Early launch: Operators can achieve the synchronization construction of indoor and outdoor networks at the early stage of 5G construction. 

Different specifications: The 5G QCell series products are diversified with different specifications, including single-band and multi-band, 5G NR 2 channels and 4 channels, built-in and external antennas, 5G NR 100~300MHz bandwidth, different variants and so on, to meet the network construction requirements in different scenarios. 

Innovative technology empowerment: SuperMIMO employs large-scale indoor distributed antenna and multi-antenna MU-MIMO networking solutions to solve interference problems and increase the cell capacity by 3~4 times. Currently, this technology has been widely applied into scenarios of high population density, such as metro, hospitals and shopping malls, in Jiangsu and Shandong of China.

In addition, 5G QCell also plays an important role in the vertical industries. The customized explosion-proof mining models have served the coal industry. 300 MHz ultra-wideband 5G QCell has been deployed in the Olympic Sports Center in Hangzhou, and is expected to provide better network services for applications such as live broadcast of HD games during the Hangzhou 2022 Asian Games. 5G QCell high-precision integrated positioning solution has been applied in the Grandview Mall for 5G supermarket in Guangzhou. The Yunnan Branch of Sunho Group has used it in asset management. 5G QCell can be configured with the 1D3U frame structure, and can provide large uplink bandwidth services for intelligent manufacturing. Since most industry applications are applied indoors, it is believed that 5G QCell will play a great role and be used more and more widely in vertical industries, propelling their digital transformation. 

To date, ZTE's QCell has served more than 50 operators with a deployment scale of over 2.5 million units, of which over 700,000 units of 5G QCell have been shipped, empowering operators around the world to build more efficient and flexible networks for indoor coverage and providing better indoor mobile broadband experiences.