PARTNER CONTENT: One of UAE’s main telecom operators — du — commercially deployed Huawei’s 5G indoor distributed Massive MIMO at the Jafza One Convention Centre, where Huawei is hosting the 2021 Global Mobile Broadband Forum (MBBF).

Users can now enjoy a perceived speed of more than 2 Gbps, with the peak rate of a single user exceeding 2.4 Gbps. With this high level of performance, the venue is the first in the Middle East to deliver 5G ubiquitous Gigabit experience. In Dubai’s central business districts, networks often need to cope with heavy traffic due to the sheer density of users. Therefore, this is slated to become a best practice that meets experience and capacity requirements.

Jafza One is a premium business complex at the heart of the Jebel Ali Free Zone (Jafza). It consists of two landmark towers, hosting over 1,200 offices across a total area of more than 10,000 m2 and covering the Jafza One Convention Centre, business centers, food plazas, and parking areas.

Convention and exhibition centers welcome thousands of visitors at once, requiring mobile networks of tremendous capacity. Conventional solutions to boost network capacity rely on adding base stations and increasing spectrum multiplexing rate — a key approach to maximize spectral efficiency. However, interference between channels operating on the same frequencies often compromises these solutions.

5G indoor distributed Massive MIMO offers an ideal alternative. The solution uses multi-antenna joint reception and transmission to convert the interference at cell edges into desired signals that carry digestible data. This reduces interference altogether, preventing speed loss while boosting overall capacity, which ultimately improves user experience.

Every space at Jafza One now enjoys wall-to-wall Gigabit experience, including exhibition halls, multi-purpose halls, meeting rooms, multimedia rooms, prayer chambers, and dining rooms, delivering the necessary assurance for Huawei’s MBBF and Global Ultra-Broadband Summit Forum (UBBF) among other large events.

“We need continuous 5G coverage in both indoor and outdoor areas to ensure good user experience, particularly in high-value landmarks where we have many users with high expectations for experience. So, we need innovative 5G solutions to ensure ubiquitous premium experience. Huawei’s 5G LampSite has shown good performance in the Jafza One Convention Centre. We will continue to innovate toward better user experience in future,” said Abdalla Alsamiri, Director IBS & Technology Planning of du.

Marvin Chen, President of Huawei DIS Product Line, noted that “5G indoor distributed massive MIMO changes networking from cell-centered to user-centered, opening a new path to improve 5G indoor experience and boost network capacity. Huawei will continue to develop innovative network solutions to help operators build even better ubiquitous Gigabit networks.”