China Unicom Beijing is deploying Huawei's new extremely-large antenna array (ELAA) architecture at over 1,000 sites around the outskirts of Beijing.
The giant antenna arrays, which are called "metaverse-ready active antenna units - MetaAAUs", double the scale of arrays compared with the previous-generation AAU. Huawei says the increased size results in extended coverage because channel beams are narrower and energy is more focused. New algorithms improve network performance while slashing energy consumption.
The companies claim the new MetaAAUs have delivered a 40% increase in coverage area, increased uplink and downlink user-perceived rates by 10%, and lowered network energy consumption by 5% over previous-generation AAUs. Since their deployment, user traffic has increased by 38% in their coverage areas and the carrier's user base has increased by 37%.
Ritchie Peng, President of Huawei 5G Product Line, said, "MetaAAU is one of our major innovations. With MetaAAU, we achieve great breakthroughs in network performance and energy efficiency, and this is attributed to our strong investment and continuous innovation in Massive MIMO. We are glad to cooperate with China Unicom Beijing on the thousand-site MetaAAU project, and proud to see that MetaAAU achieves the desired performance across the entire network. We believe this can provide a useful reference for global operators in selecting Massive MIMO technologies for different scenarios."
