Berlin Trial Shows Throughput Boost

• Deutsche Telekom launches Europe’s fastest 3.5GHz Massive MIMO field trial with Huawei
• Commercial Sony smartphones fully integrated for the first time in the world
• Massive MIMO is a key technology for improving spectral efficiency to deliver greater network capacity

A former Deutsche Telekom telephone exchange in Berlin Schöneberg is actually turning into  a hub for cutting edge technology developments. Only a few days after DT and Huawei unveiled Europe’s first pre-standard 5G connection there, the partners are announcing another breakthrough. They launched the fastest 3.5 GHz LTE TDD Massive MIMO field trial with 20MHz bandwidth at 3.5GHz band reaching 750Mbps. And in a world’s first, the trial uses fully integrated commercial smartphones – thanks to Sony, who modified some Sony Xperia Smartphones to support this trial. Combining massive MIMO and 256QAM, they set a new European record.

Improved spectral efficiency offers a route to higher network capacity. With its large-scale multi-antenna array, Massive MIMO can generate much more precise user-specific beam and utilize the multi-user beamforming technology to increase the spectrum efficiency by multiple times. Served by Massive MIMO, users will always have excellent experience and the cell capacity will be greatly unleashed even for the most crowded cells such as business centers, stadiums, squares, train stations, big events, residential areas or universities. Massive MIMO also provides a fast and effective coverage solution for high-rising buildings with its 3D-Beamforming capability in both horizontal and vertical directions. Above all with TDD spectrum, Massive MIMO can be well compatible with current LTE TDD terminals. During this field trial, commercial Sony Xperia XZ Premium Smartphones were used. They have been specially modified to integrate TDD capable at 3.5GHz spectrum. The outcome of this excellent cooperation: The world’s first 3.5GHz massive MIMO trial using commercial smartphones.

"Massive MIMO is an established LTE technology to achieve superb spectrum efficiency improvements", said Martin Bouchard, responsible for network strategy, technical planning and rollout at Deutsche Telekom in Germany. "It will also be a key technology for achieving greater efficiency gains in higher frequency ranges associated with 5G New Radio. “We are very proud that Sony proved once again, in the great and long lasting cooperation with partner Deutsche Telekom, that our new technology flagship Xperia XZ Premium is a leading smartphone in the industry” said Izumi Kawanishi, EVP, Sony Mobile Communications Inc. “We have strong ambitions to continue that way with 5G as the next step”. 

"3.5GHz is a major spectrum asset of Deutsche Telekom", said Wang Yang, Vice President of Huawei TDD product line. " This joint technical innovation is another big milestone in terms of long-term strategic cooperation between both parties, Huawei is quite happy to cooperate with Deutsche Telekom to unleash its great potential in 4G as well as 5G. Massive MIMO is an ideal companion for 3.5GHz band in terms of both capacity and coverage. We believe this joint innovation will bring technology advance as well as business success to Deutsche Telekom."

Source: Deutsche Telekom media announcement