ZTE Corporation, together with Qualcomm and the Hunan Branch of China Telecom, has completed the end-to-end trial of the “Fusion Assisting Super TDD”(FAST) solution based on 2.1 and 3.5 GHz on the commercial network of Changsha city in Hunan province. By flexibly aggregating three-frequency carriers of 2.1 and 3.5 GHz, the solution significantly improves 5G uplink/downlink throughput.
With the implement of 5G commercialization strategies toward dual-band (2.1 and 3.5 GHz) to achieve excellent widespread coverage and high capacity, the Hunan Branch of China Telecom keeps on exploring more efficient and in-depth spectrum harmonization solutions to guarantee better quality of services and meet growing demand of massive data capacity requirements of services, including HD video, online games, and AR/VR services.
Based on carrier aggregation (CA) technology in 3GPP Rel-15 and enhancement of 3GPP Rel-16, the FAST solution deeply coordinates multi-band multi-carriers in both uplink and downlink to boost the system performance in capacity and coverage.
The Hunan Branch of China Telecom deployed the FAST solution in its commercial network of Changsha city, bolstered with ZTE RAN system and Qualcomm's 4th-generation “5G Modem to Antenna” solution powered by Snapdragon® X65 5G Modem-RF System.
In addition, the Hunan Branch of China Telecom has conducted the commercial trial of downlink 3CC CA of 3.5 and 2.1 GHz with up to 240 MHz aggregation bandwidth. The result achieves a maximum downlink data rate of 3.9 Gbps, increasing by 1.6x on 3.5 GHz single carrier network.
With the feature of UL Tx Switching of Rel-16, uplink time division mode carrier aggregation (UL TDM CA) of 2.1 and 3.5 GHz is enabled to boost uplink data rate up to 511 Mbps, an increase of about 38 percent on 3.5 GHz single carrier network.
This trial shows that the FAST solution offers excellent spectrum harmonization for coverage and capacity both in downlink and uplink.
Moving forward, the Hunan Branch of China Telecom, Qualcomm and ZTE will continue to work together to promote the in-depth integration of multi-band of 3.5 and 2.1 GHz on 5G commercial network, so as to build an efficient and low-OPEX 5G network with top-quality and superior performance.