PRESS RELEASE: China Telecom and Huawei held a joint conference to launch the innovative “Super TimeFreq Folding” technology for 5G-Advanced. At the conference, Gan Bin, Vice President of Huawei Wireless Solution, delivered a keynote speech titled “Continuous Innovation, Lighting Up the Future of Digital Intelligence”. In his speech, Gan Bin shared, “China Telecom and Huawei have continuously made breakthroughs in uplink capability, which has achieved Gbps uplink through innovations such as Super TimeFreq Folding — a technology that helps build 5.5G “1+1+N” networks to deepen the transformation to a digital and intelligent society.”

The rapid rise of XR and 3D AI is greatly increasing the demand for better uplink capability. The 1+1+N deployment approach for 5.5G requires networks to support millisecond-level latency while providing ubiquitous uplink Gbps and downlink 10 Gbps. China Telecom and Huawei work together to continuously innovate to break through bottlenecks in uplink based on customers’ requirements.

In the early stage of 5G, China Telecom and Huawei jointly proposed a new 7:3 timeslot configuration to enhance uplink experience. To further improve uplink capability, China Telecom and Huawei launched Super Uplink and Super Frequency Fusion to fully utilize FDD spectrum and C-band TDD spectrum coordination, improving the uplink experience by three times.

As 5G moves to the full sub-100 GHz bands, China Telecom and Huawei have been looking to fully leverage the TDD spectrum, which provides an ultra-large bandwidth. Super TimeFreq Folding uses TDD dual-carrier time-domain folding and complementation technology, which enables all timeslots to be used for the uplink transmission, and high bandwidth is supported for both the uplink and downlink, improving the uplink capability to over Gbps while reducing the latency to less than 4 ms.

Their continuous joint work has helped enhance uplink capability significantly, leading the development of the uplink industry. The core technologies of the “super” solutions have been incorporated into 3GPP specifications, finding its way to play a bigger role in building a mature ecosystem involving devices, networks, chips, and industry applications. This will accelerate the commercial use of uplink capability.

“Ubiquitous Gbps-level uplink is important for 5.5G’s ‘1+1+N’, ” Gan Bin concluded. “We will continue to work with China Telecom and other industry partners to continuously innovate and upgrade mobile network capabilities, to achieve the vision of changing society with 5G.”