SoftBank and ZTE jointly deployed a Pre5G Massive MIMO 2.0 solution at the Fukuoka Yahuoku Dome for last month's 2017 Japan Series baseball championship.
The home field of the SoftBank Hawks, which won the championship 4-3 over the DeNA BayStars, was equipped with onsite communications equipment supporting key Pre5G technologies such as Massive MIMO 2.0 beamforming with 64 transmitters and 64 receivers.
The solution accounted for 80% of the total traffic volume in SoftBank's network during the championship, ZTE said.
Statistics also show that deploying the solution increased downlink aggregate traffic by 451.5%, uplink aggregate traffic by 759.5% and the average user uplink rate by 42.9%.
ZTE and SoftBank have been collaborating on pre5G R&D since July 2015. SoftBank was also the first operator to put Massive MIMO technology into commercial use and ZTE was its major supplier for this deployment.
Pre5G enhances system capacity by eight times compared to 4G, while average user bandwidth is improved by five times and the number of connections per unit area by 100 times. It involves both the applications of key 5G candidate technologies as well as the enhancement of LTE-Pro technologies.