Its products include mmWave and sub-6Ghz base stations, supporting the 5G New Radio (NR) air interfaces being standardised by the 3GPP. The base stations use massive MIMO, beam tracking, beamforming and other key 5G technologies. ZTE said it's investing more than CNY 1 billion a year in 5G R&D. It's already completed the initial phase of national 5G tests in China, as well as 5G single-point technology and prototype verification. It has now entered the verification and R&D phase.
ZTE’s pre-5G products have been deployed already in more than 40 networks in 30 countries around the world, and the company has signed strategic partnerships on 5G development with carriers including Deutsche Telekom, Telefonica, SoftBank, KT Group, China Mobile, China Telecom and China Unicom.
ZTE also announced at MWC its 5G Flexhaul platform, a fronthaul and backhaul integrated solution based on IP and Optical technology. This provides unified transport of 5G fronthaul and backhaul services on one device, with SDN-based traffic engineering. IP+Optical integrated devices are used in the mass access layer to reduce network construction costs and save equipment room space. It implements "super-large" bandwidth transport by multi-wavelength connection between adjacent nodes. Additionally, with the FlexE feature, it can flexibly isolate sub-channels of different services to provide optimal forwarding plane support for 5G bearer network slicing.
The ZXCTN 6180H, a 5G transport pre-commercial solution also being showcased at MWC. It is only 3RU high and supports up to 1Tbps networking capacity of one access ring.
