Telecom equipment vendors have taken more strides towards delivering 5G networks, with the 5GNOW project reaching completion and ZTE announcing an R&D partnership in Malaysia.
ZTE has announced it has entered an R&D partnership with Malaysia's U Mobile focused on the development of pre-5G and 5G mobile broadband technologies.
Through the partnership U Mobile plans to leverage ZTE's pre-5G technologies, including Massive MIMO, to enhance the performance of its mobile network. The operators will also collaborate on R&D for 5G technologies.
“U Mobile is constantly exploring new technology that will provide best in class users experience to our customers,” U Mobile CTO Too Tian Jen commented.
“We see 5G technology 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.”
ZTE has similar 5G R&D partnerships in place with Japan's SoftBank and with South Korea's KT.
Meanwhile the 5GNOW project, led by Alcatel-Lucent, wrapped up this month. The collaborative project concentrated on the flexibility and device support requirements for next-generation mobile networks.
Alcatel-Lucent said the project has identified ways to increase the number of devices connected to a mobile network by 100 times over what can be supported today, and ways to tweak the network to react 50 times more quickly.
Bell Labs head of wireless research Tod Sizer noted that the proposed innovations will allow future networks to cope with the real-time connectivity requirements of smart cities, smart manufacturing and the IoT.
“Mobile networks are quickly becoming our lifeline for all types of communications. Things such as growing industrial usage, traffic cams, sensors as well as the continued growth of consumer data, are going to severely challenge current networks,” he said.
“Our plan for 5G is to enhance the network in a converged way that will allow service providers to maintain the quality users expect, deliver the capacity they demand, and provide the ability to support new applications and services, such as IoT and M2M type.”