ZTE, together with China Mobile and Qualcomm, announced the demonstration of a Pre5G gigabit rate solution on a TD-LTE commercial network in Quanzhou, Fujian in China leveraging multi-carrier aggregation, 4 x 4 MIMO, 256QAM and other advanced technologies.
During the latest demonstration, China Mobile and ZTE also verified the Pre5G gigabit solution utilising Qualcomm commercial Snapdragon 835 platform and achieved a peak rate of up to 700 Mbit/s using a 10-stream data transmission on a single phone.
ZTE noted that in a white paper assessing 5G vision and requirements, the IMT-2020 (5G) promotion group stated that 5G should support a user data rate of between 100 Mbit/s and 1 Gbit/s. One of ZTE's four-core Pre5G technologies, Giga+ mobile broadband (MBB), uses massive MIMO, multi-carrier aggregation and high-order modulation technologies to improve spectrum efficiency and network-wide capacity and is designed to deliver a peak rate of over 1 Gbit/s.
Previously, in June Quanzhou Mobile and ZTE jointly implemented a commercial deployment of 3D-MIMO in big video environments. With 16 commercial terminals connected, the single-carrier downlink peak cell rate achieved was nearly 730 Mbit/s, while the single-carrier 16-stream downlink peak rate for 3D-MIMO reached 700 Mbit/s, equivalent to a three-carrier rate of up to 2.1 Gbit/s.
ZTE noted that the use in the latest demonstration of 4 x 4 MIMO, multi-carrier aggregation and high-order baseband modulation (256QAM) technologies, together with commercial chips in the commercial network, is designed to significantly improve the efficiency of spectrum utilisation without increasing bandwidth, and can provide a user data rate of more than 1 Gbit/s.
ZTE's Pre5G solution involves both key 5G technologies such as massive MIMO and commercial availability on 4G networks, as well as enhancements to the LTE Advanced (LTE-A) Pro technologies in the 3GPP architecture, including massive CA, unified delivery network (UDN), 256QAM, licensed assisted access (LAA), WiFi link aggregation (LWA) and narrowband Internet of things (NB-IoT).
