ZTE launches 5G Cloud RAN solution, says IoT will spark new industrial revolution

ZTE has announced the launch of a flagship radio solution targeting 5G, claimed a record-breaking long-haul transmission test, and stated that IoT will spark the fourth industrial revolution.

In what has been a busy week for the Chinese technology vendor, the ZTE Cloud RAN was the most significant announcement addressing the 5G radio access network. ZTE says the fully virtualized RAN solution is designed to reconstruct the wireless network based on cloud processing platforms, which it says will allow operators to rapidly deploy networks and meet future performance challenges associated with 5G.

Cloud RAN is one of the most prominent technologies being discussed as part of the next generation radio network for 5G; and a major part of its success, ZTE says, comes down to the seamless integration of all existing connectivity modes, from 2G to 5G, with everything in between from wifi to IoT.

According to ZTE, 5G presents new and unprecedented RAN challenges for operators, including processing performance, coordination capability and service deployment. It will be launching a commercial deployment of the ZTE Cloud RAN solution with global customers in Q2 2017.

Meanwhile, ZTE has also claimed a world-record achievement in the optical networking transmission arena. It says that it has managed to successfully demonstrate a record-breaking single-carrier 800G long-haul high-speed transmission result, successfully transmitting 120-Gbaud wavelength-division multiplexing 16QAM signals over 1,200-kilmoetre terrestrial fibre links. The significance of this, apparently, is that the achievement will be demonstrate its possible to support the next-generation transport standard to cope with the exponential growth of IP traffic.

“Thanks to the high baud rate signals generation, transport interfaces with bit-rates of up to 1Tb/s will be achieved in the near future,” said Jianjun Yu, ZTE’s Chief Scientist in its US Optical Lab. “We can expect that bit rates beyond 1Tb/s, such as 1.6Tb/s, will be introduced as Ethernet standard rates since it would be a logical upward path rate from the 400Gb Ethernet interface, which is based on high baud rate signals and high order modulation formats.”

Elsewhere, ZTE president Zhao Xianming has said IoT is going to spark the fourth industrial revolution and transform how societies work and live.

“The IoT has created significant progress in intelligent manufacturing, smart cities, intelligent transportation, and smart homes,” he said. “Various innovative IoT applications will soon emerge. We’re at the eve of a powerful new IoT-enabled revolution in business and as a global society. All parties across the industrial chain have a collaborative, cooperative role to play in promoting the healthy development of the IoT industry.”

Finally, ZTE’s cloud-based core network, vCN, won an award for best core network product at the LTE & 5G Awards in London this week.

“ZTE’s vCN fully satisfied 5G network and IoT requirements,” said GM of ZTE’s core network products Liu Jianhua. “Based on a cloud-based vCN, network operators can reconstruct networks and open network capabilities, making network operation automatic and programmable and meeting the customised requirements of multiple I oT applications in the 5G era.”