Visitors walk in front of the ZTE stand at the Mobile World Congress 2016 in Barcelona, Spain, Feb 22, 2016. (Photo/Xinhua)
Given the capacity and performance bottlenecks of the existing 4G networks and 5G's commercial use still four years away, ZTE unveiled a solution that aims to eliminate the frustration.
As the first vendor to propose Pre5G technology concepts and series solutions, the company released a white paper named "Pre5G: Building the Bridge to 5G" on Wednesday at the Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Shanghai.
According to Xiang Jiying, ZTE's chief scientist, as the bridge from 4G to 5G, Pre5G focuses on the following three fields: enhanced mobile bandwidth, IoT and cloud networks.
Compared to 4G, Pre5G achieves a six-fold increase in system capacity, a five-fold increase in average bandwidth and 100 times the number of connections per unit area.
"Pre5G networks will begin with IaaS (virtual-network-based function), gradually developed to PaaS (open and programmable network), and finally achieve XaaS (fully open network capability) to support end-to-end 5G sliced networks and service innovation," Xiang said.
According to the company, ZTE Pre5G involves not only the application of key 5G technologies with commercial capabilities (for example, Massive MIMO) on 4G networks to provide 5G user experiences on existing commercial 4G terminals, but also the enhancement of LTE-A Pro technologies in 3GPP architecture.
As a transition technology to be utilized before the mass popularization of 5G, Pre5G Massive MIMO has been deployed to many telecom operators in China, the Asia-Pacific region and Europe, including China Mobile, SoftBank, KT, Umobile and Hutchison Drei Austria.
"Ten commercial networks from global perspective will use ZTE's Pre5G service in the future," the company said.
"5G is a promising sunrise industry that will effectively present in many ways, and we've talked to enterprises from a verity of sectors for further implementing, such as BMW and domestic Internet company Baidu," Xiang said.
The company is introducing new technology, such as Multi-User Shared Access (MUSA), to overcome the limited performance of Narrow Band Internet of Things (NB-IoT), caused by what is known as Long Term Evolution (LTE).
Earlier this week, the company signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) for the development of 5G with Spanish mobile operator Telefonica.
On June 21, ZTE announced it had completed the prototype verification and performance testing of high-frequency communication -- one of the key 5G technologies-- with help from China Mobile's Shanghai research institute.
The joint test result completely fulfills the theoretical expectation, achieving a single user peak rate of more than 3.7 Gbps.
The company has achieved nearly one thousand patents associated with 5G technologies and is keen to develop the next generation Internet of Things prototype. It will be based on 5G, utilizing 5G experiments and established networks dominated by the government.
