Partner on 5G mobile network for collaboration on pre-5G and 5G research
ZTE Corporation has signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with Malaysian mobile network operator, U Mobile, for the development of pre-5G mobile broadband technologies, strengthening the two companies’ partnership on next generation network innovations.
The partnership will help U Mobile deliver substantial network performance upgrades using ZTE’s proprietary pre-5G technologies, including massive multiple input multiple output (MIMO) technology. ZTE’s pre-5G base station enhances spectral efficiency of current 4G LTE networks between four to six times by using massive MIMO technology.
The MOU, signed in Shenzhen by Too Tian Jen, CTO at U Mobile, and Steven Ge, MD at ZTE Malaysia, also covers collaboration between the two companies on research and development of 5G technologies, in addition to pre-5G.
As a data-centric telco, 70% of U Mobile subscribers are smartphone users. Looking at a recent consumer behaviour study in early 2015, the Malaysian public spends an average of three hours and 39 minutes browsing the internet for work, information, searching and entertainment, which is ranked the highest in the South East Asia region.
Too commented: “U Mobile is constantly exploring new technology that will provide best in class user experiences to our customers. We see 5G as the technology that would support the ever increasing communication needs of the future. The collaboration with ZTE will also support our government’s vision of being a Smart Digital Nation by 2020.”
In June 2014, ZTE was the first vendor to propose the pre-5G concept, and the company launched a pre-5G base station integrating the base band unit (BBU) and remote radio unit (RRU) solutions at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona in March 2015, enabling carriers to emulate the behaviour of future 5G networks on existing 4G long term evolution (LTE) network infrastructure. ZTE is also working towards research of other 5G technologies, including multi-user shared access (MUSA) and ultra-dense networks (UDN).
ZTE’s collaboration on pre5G research with U Mobile follows the announcements of similar partnerships with SoftBank Corporation in Japan, and KT Corporation in Korea.
