PARTNER FEATURE: This brings users there a 33% boost in single-user drive test rates on average and an up to fourfold increase in cell capacity to around 5 Gbps.

Recently, China Mobile Shandong hit yet another huge milestone with the deployment of Huawei’s 5G indoor distributed Massive MIMO technology in multiple important indoor landmarks in Shandong province, an eastern Chinese province on the Yellow Sea, including metro lines and airports.

This technology integrates Massive MIMO into Huawei’s 5G digital indoor system (DIS) network solution LampSite. By combining multiple 4T4R indoor distributed cells to form a single cell, it eliminates interference between cells to boost both the capacity and experience of mobile networks in large 5G indoor scenarios.

The technology was deployed along the Jinan Metro Line R2, which is the construction name of Line 2, and in the Jinan Yaoqiang International Airport. The large number of passengers in these large indoor areas often means a staggeringly high density of mobile users, causing the traffic load to soar in the mobile networks. Conventional cell splitting enables limited gains for overall capacity while also attributing to strong interference between cells. This has been a major cause of poor experience for users when passing the boundary areas of two cells.

5G indoor distributed Massive MIMO replaces cell splitting to significantly improve the performance of the 5G LampSite networks in both the metro and airport. Drive tests showed that the single-user rate increased by 33% on average and the cell capacity also saw an up to quadrupled increase to around 5 Gbps. Such a high level of performance can guarantee user experience in areas with heavy loads and a high density of users. Particularly at the boundary areas of two cells, the average user-perceived rate is as high as 350%, helping to provide consistently high-speed access for users in these indoor places.

Distributed Massive MIMO provides four-fold capacity increase over cell splitting

In addition to playing a unique role in heavy-load ToC cases involving a high density of users, 5G distributed Massive MIMO is a powerful tool to meet the high uplink throughput requirements of ToB services across various verticals. Utilizing this technology, China Mobile Shandong will continue to build the leading indoor network capabilities required to empower both 5G ToC and ToB services with premium experience.