China Mobile, the world’s largest mobile operator, has deployed a wideband Massive MIMO site on its network in Shanghai using equipment from Huawei.

The deployment allows a single module to support three carriers on the 2.6GHz band, boosting the spectral efficiency of cells threefold, Huawei said. The live network demonstrated peak cell throughput rates of 72Mb/s on the uplink and 630Mb/s on the downlink.

The two companies claim the deployment is the world’s first commercial wideband Massive MIMO site.

The solution provides an uplink eight-stream capability configuration to enhance the uplink performance of the operator’s TD-LTE network, according to the vendor.

Huawei said in a statement that it marks “a great leap forward for large-scale commercial Massive MIMO technology and the beginning of a planned series of events outlined in the timetable for the 5G large-bandwidth evolution”.