ZTE has made a series of 5G-releated announcements at Mobile World Congress 2017 in Barcelona, including the release of the industry's first IP+Optical 5G Flexhaul transport solution.
The new solution is designed to provide unified transport of 5G fronthaul and backhaul services on one device, supporting the super-large bandwidth and ultra-low latency requirements of 5G.
It incorporates SDN-based traffic engineering, and combines Flex Ethernet and IP+Optical architecture.
ZTE projects that 5G Flexhaul can reduce the total cost of ownership by 30% compared to traditional fronthaul and backhaul solutions.
ZTE also announced it has completed a demonstration of Pre5G FDD Massive MIMO with eight 4G terminals connected simultaneously, achieving peak data rates of 2.6-GHz in a single cell.
The company launched the first FDD based Massive MIMO solution in December. The technology uses a patented channel measurement and estimation algorithm as well as a custom ZTE vector processing chip for strong signal computing and processing.
On the TDD front, ZTE held a demonstration of its Pre5G TDD Massive MIMO 2.0 product at the event, setting a new record of 2.1Gbps for a single site peak rate.
The product supports 16-stream spatial division multiplexing, three-carrier aggregation and 256 quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM).
Looking ahead, ZTE announced that its Pre5G products are scheduled for commercial pre-deployment starting from the third quarter of next year. The vendor also expects its products to be deployed in commercial 5G networks in the first quarter of 2019.
New 5G products released at MWC2017 include a range of new mmWave and sub 6-GHz base stations supporting pre-standard 3GPP 5G new radio (NR) air interfaces, as well as technologies including massive MIMO, beam tracking and beamforming.