Accelerating Success of 5G
Taking 5G as its core strategy, ZTE has dedicated fully effort into Standards, Product R&D, Pre-commercial verification, and works together with industry partners to accelerate commercialization process, achieving 5G leadership in following three aspects: leading 5G commercialization, leading 5G technologies, leading 5G economies of scale.
As early as 2012, ZTE began to strategically invest in 5G. In MWC2017, we launched series of 5G pre-commercial product, covering Sub6GHz to mmWave, and participated in several 5G field trials. So far, we have established strategic cooperation partnership with several tier 1 operators, including China Mobile, China Unicom, China Telecom, Telstra, SoftBank, Orange, Telefonica, WindTre, T-Mobile, KT, Telenet, AIS, etc. Until now, more than 10 5G pre-commercial networks has been deployed worldwide.
In Europe, ZTE partners with WindTre and Open Fiber, the largest mobile operator in Italy and Italy’s wholesale fiber network operator respectively, to build Europe's earliest 5G pre-commercial network in the 3.6-3.8GHz band. ZTE plans to provide the most advanced 5G end-to-end network solution for the pre-commercial field test and partner with WindTre, Open Fiber, local universities, and enterprises to comprehensively test and verify 5G technical performance, network architecture, 4G/5G network integration and future 5G use cases, including AR/VR, smart city, public safety, 5G healthcare and Industry 4.0. In October, 2017, ZTE and Orange announced an innovation partnership in 5G. The two parties will cooperate on testing and assessing several key 5G enabling technologies, including standalone architecture, new 5G core network, end-to-end network slicing, one of the key promises of 5G, and “5G overlay” architectures. In Japan, ZTE signed an agreement with Softbank, announcing it will set up a 5G field trial based on 4.5GHz frequency band in the downtown and the busiest area of Tokyo in May, 2017. Later in 20 November, 2017, SoftBank obtained its experimental license on 4.5GHz. Both sides will start the substantiative experiment at experimental sites constructed at Shiba-Daimon area in Tokyo. In China, we cooperated with global largest mobile operator China Mobile to launch industry first 5G pre-commercial site @Sub6GHz. The network is deployed covering Guangzhou University city which is complicated, and close to real 5G network environment.
ZTE is committed to become the leading provider for 5G commercial product and solution. ZTE has released commercial oriented 5G product portfolio:
• 64T64R @Sub6GHz: with 200MHz bandwidth and 200W output power, it is the smallest and lightest in the industry.
• mmWave AAU: bandwidth can achieve 1GHz with high power, and it has been verified in field trial ahead of other vendors.
• Most powerful IT BBU: covering 2/3/4/5G multi-modes, largest capacity with 2U height, and most abundant interfaces
In terms of standard, ZTE takes the leading position in technological innovation and is an active contributor to 5G standard research. 800 5G standard experts participate in all of the mainstream standardization organizations and promotion platforms, including ITU/3GPP/IEEE/NGMN/ETSI/OpenFog/CCSA/IMT-2020/5GIA/ 5GAA. So far, ZTE has submitted a total of 4,000 international proposals in the 3GPP 5G NR field. Three experts from ZTE have been elected as the chief editor of 3 very important 5G standard working groups. In March 2017, the NOMA, led by ZTE, was successfully listed in 3GPP. And MUSA, proposed by ZTE, is one of these, which allows more users access into the system.
Looking forward to the future, ZTE will conduct pre-deployment of 5G commercial network in 2018, support the first wave construction of 5G commercial network in 2019 and realize large scale commercialization in 2020.