Australia’s Optus and Huawei have announced they have completed a successful infield test of Massive MIMO as part of the operator’s upgrade path to 5G.
The trial used 128 transmit 128 receive Massive MIMO technology, achieving aggregate cell throughput of 665Mbps over a single 20 MHz carrier on the 2300-MHz frequency band, shared by 16 devices.
Optus managing director for networks Dennis Wong said the trial demonstrated an aggregated speed improvement of up to eight times the capacity of existing 4G cell sites.
“We’re seeing a 75% year on year increase in data consumption. Massive MIMO is an important step along the journey to 5G as it allows us to immediately increase cell site capacity and spectrum efficiency,” he said.
“For customers, this means that their experience will be of consistently high standard even in high usage situations – regardless of whether your neighbour is downloading movies, or the person across the hall streaming 4K videos off YouTube.”
He said the testing also indicates that the beamforming capabilities of Massive MIMO can deliver significant improvements in areas with high density populations, such as high-rises.
In January, Huawei also completed field verification of the first FDD-based Massive MIMO technology, in collaboration with China Unicom. Major vendors showcased Massive MIMO technologies at Mobile World Congress 2017 this week.
