ZTE said it will develop six new 5G services with China Mobile focusing on the areas of mobile internet, IoT, smart home, smart education, big video and terminal services.
Unveiled at the China Mobile Global Partners Conference 2017 in Shenzhen, China, the two companies focused on the world’s first 5G Interoperability Data Testing (IoDT) test, the 5G experience car, 5G unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV), 5G wireless access, 5G submarine and a 5G VR cloud game.
For the 5G IoDT test, ZTE’s 5G New Radio (5G NR) precommercial base stations were used with Qualcomm Technologies’ 5G NR UE prototype. The test was conducted in the China Mobile 5G Innovation Center Lab and was broadcast live at the conference.
The 5G experience car allows users to watch 5G live programs and see 5G high-bandwidth VR videos in a high-speed moving scenario, according to ZTE. Test data of the 5G network can be viewed in real time, including the rate, wireless coverage, throughput, mobility and delay. ZTE showed two-way interactive live broadcasting between the booth and a 5G experience car in the Guangzhou Higher Education Mega Center.
ZTE also showed how a 5G UAV can transmit HD images to the cloud without any damage to picture quality and generate topographic maps in just a few seconds, thereby improving the efficiency of terrain survey and mapping.
With the 5G autonomous submarine, marine researchers can observe sea creatures with VR technology, conduct scientific investigations and potentially stop the leakage of oil pipelines by remotely controlling underwater vehicles, ZTE said, demonstrating the potential of 5G in industrial control, scientific research, rescue and disaster relief.
ZTE last week also announced that it has provided SoftBank with 5G base stations and core network equipment for the 4.5 GHz band. The two companies are working at experimental sites in the Shiba-Daimon area in Tokyo. Massive MIMO is one of the elemental technologies for 5G.
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ZTE previously said that it had verified massive MIMO with 24 terminals downloading FTP data simultaneously at a rate of 956 Mbps on a 20 MHz bandwidth. The feat used pre-5G TDD massive MIMO 2.0 technology in a commercial network in Nagasaki, Japan.
SoftBank is ZTE’s first pilot partner in the Smart Life project, which ZTE considers an important strategic move for post-4G networks, the preliminary phase of 5G networks and even future 5G networks in the next three to five years. SoftBank and ZTE already have carried out R&D in the areas of spectrum efficiency, 4G/5G network integration, mobile bandwidth, IoT and the internet of vehicles.