China Mobile and ZTE take another small step towards 5G

China Mobile and ZTE have announced (yet) another partnership which takes the pair one (small) step closer to the world of 5G.

The partnership itself will focus around the development of Massive MIMO base stations and the ultra-dense network (small cells), making the map for the 5G network a bit clearer. While capacity is a major talking point for anything 5G related, more conversations are starting to revolve around the efficiency side of things as well.

It might not be the most exciting aspect of the evolution, but when efficiency is a talking point in a technologies lifecycle, it is usually a good sign that the real world isn’t too far away. One interpretation could be that the industry has given the thumbs up (in this case China Mobile) on the effectiveness of the tech, but now it has to be efficient enough to be economically viable on a commercial scale.

“ZTE is willing to work with the partners in the industry chain to build more energy-efficient networks from the six perspectives of architecture evolution, networking, energy-saving technologies, application scenarios, new base stations, and chip evolution, laying a solid foundation for large-scale commercial use of 5G networks,” said Zhang Shizhuang, Planning Director of ZTE’s TDD product line.

ZTE’s attempt at swaying the conversation is its Access Cloud Engine (ACE) solution. With a unified cloud architecture and shared infrastructure, ZTE claims the solution supports mobile-edge computing (MEC) and the flexible deployment of services.

If that doesn’t get your blood going on a Wednesday afternoon, I’m not too sure what will.