Belgian telco Telenet and Chinese equipment vendor ZTE are continuing their working relationship with the announcement that they have completed Europe’s ‘first’ FDD Massive MIMO field application. The site chosen for the field test was the home of music festival Rock Werchter in Werchter. In a ZTE press release the company stated: ‘The field application used 20MHz of spectrum and six terminals to complete a twelve-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.’
Telenet CTO Micha Berger added: ‘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.’