Japan's SoftBank has signed separate research collaboration agreements with both Huawei and ZTE covering the development of stopgap technologies on the road towards 5G.
SoftBank will team up with ZTE to help develop networking equipment based on ZTE's Pre5G technology, such as the vendor's Massive MIMO base stations.
Massive MIMO base stations have the capacity to support more than 100 antenna elements, allowing up to eight users to transfer data simultaneously.
SoftBank already has cooperation agreements covering Massive MIMO as well as ultra-dense networks and multi-user shared access technology.
“The technology being developed under this agreement will help define future mobile internet communications,” SoftBank senior vice president Keiichi Makizono said. “In our plans to develop next-generation mobile networks, SoftBank will derive large benefits from the Pre5G collaboration with ZTE.”
Huawei separately announced it has signed a memorandum of understanding with SoftBank covering collaboration on verification testing, evaluation and R&D for Huawei's proposed TDD+ 4.5G technology.
Softbank will use its networks to test the proposed technology, which Huawei said has the potential to increase the frequency resource efficiency on AXGP networks by around five times.
Huawei president of wireless networks David Wang said TDD+ technology will potentially help operators reduce the total cost of ownership of their TD-LTE networks .“It also creates new services and provides a communications environment able to adapt to user demands," he said.