Telenet Belgium and ZTE announce first FDD Massive MIMO field application in Europe

19 October - 2017, Shenzhen, China: ZTE Corporation (0763.HK / 000063.SZ), a major international provider of telecommunications, enterprise and consumer technology solutions for the Mobile Internet, and Telenet today announced the first FDD Massive MIMO field application in Europe. The field demonstration site was chosen in Werchter, home of Rock Werchter music festival.

The field application used 20MHz of spectrum and 6 terminals to complete an 12-stream verification, achieved an average single user speed of 120Mbps, 710Mbps peak cell speed, and improved spectrum efficiency by 3.3 times compared to traditional LTE base stations.

With the rapid growth of mobile broadband services, user data requirements have been increasing exponentially, but 4G spectrum limitations cause a bottleneck in network capacity improvement. Massive MIMO is a key 5G network technology, and a ZTE Pre5G core solution, introducing 5G capabilities into existing 4G networks. ZTE was the first vendor to make Massive MIMO technology available for all FDD-LTE networks, which account for 85 percent of the world’s LTE networks. It will help operators significantly increase network capacity without the requirement of costly additional spectrum. More importantly, the deployment of FDD Massive MIMO does not require changes to the existing 4G network architecture, and is fully compatible with current 4G terminals. This brings immediate commercial benefits to the operator while boosting the customer experience.

Telenet and ZTE have been in a long-term strategic partnership since 2016, and ZTE is the sole radio network vendor.

“We're very excited that, with ZTE, we have completed the first FDD Massive MIMO trial in Europe, achieving the highest single cell throughput within the 20MHz spectrum. This new speed record is a milestone along our evolution to 5G, and we will continue to build a faster network with higher capacity, improving mobile users’ broadband experiences.” said Micha Berger, Telenet's CTO.

“ZTE is very proud to work with Telenet in realising Europe's first field application for FDD-LTE Massive MIMO technology. We believe that this solution can significantly improve Telenet network performance, delivering the best broadband experience to Telenet customers,” said Wenhao Tang, Vice President, CTO of Europe and America Region of ZTE.

“In addition, ZTE will work closely with the Telenet Innovation Center, where we will continue development of new solutions and products for network performance improvement to provide an improved user experience and new services. This will help Telenet continuously improve network competitiveness and brand value.”

Since ZTE launched the world’s first FDD Massive MIMO product in December 2016, the solution has rapidly gained recognition in the industry. Thus far, ZTE has cooperated with more than 10 operators in verifying and deploying FDD Massive MIMO solutions in China, Belgium, Thailand, Indonesia, Australia and more, including scaled commercial deployments with China Telecom and China Unicom. The ZTE FDD Massive MIMO solution will meet more extensive demands for higher spectrum efficiency and pave a new way to 5G evolution for 4G operators all over the world.