The Greater Bay Area of Guangdong, Hong Kong and Macao is one of the most open and economically dynamic regions in China. With the rapid development of the urbanization, there are a large number of urban villages in Guangzhou, Shenzhen and the surrounding areas, and super-high-rise residential buildings are also very common. To meet people’s entertainment requirements, such as 5G HD video calls, online games, and video on demand, and promote the development of production services such as e-commerce live webcast, in-depth 5G coverage is urgently needed in high-rise buildings and urban village residential areas. However, a traditional coverage solution called “spotlight” is still used in urban residential buildings. This old solution requires a large number of feeders routed along with lots of power distribution, increasing the construction difficulty and cost, and causes serious problems such as signal loss along the way. In addition, the “spotlight” antennas cannot be monitored and are often difficult for daily maintenance.

China Unicom Guangdong pays particular attention to the coverage and experience of 5G in residential area. Based on the careful study of the real situation in the residential area, Guangdong Unicom and Huawei proposed the innovative DRS solution. This solution fully utilizes the fundamental 5G coverage of surrounding macro base stations. Then it uses a super-flexible feeder to accurately deliver useful 5G signals to required places. In this way, the innovative architecture of the 5G DRS solution not only effectively prevents the leakage of useful signals along the route, but also enables digital management and control of the entire system. The onsite verification at China Unicom Guangdong showed that the 5G DRS solution improves 5G uplink coverage by about 10 dB compared with the traditional “spotlight” antenna solution, reduces system power consumption by more than 50%, and can be deployed at a maximum distance of 100 meters.

With “U-Joy Cities” program, China Unicom Guangdong and Huawei, together with other partners in the mobile industry, will further strengthen their innovative cooperation and conduct in-depth research on tunnels, high-speed railways, and street block scenarios, to make the 5G connection for people easier and faster, so as to make the life in Guangdong a smarter and more enjoyable life.