PARTNER FEATURE: On November 24, at the 2020 Global Wireless User Congress and 5G Summit hosted by ZTE, Bai Gang, vice-president of ZTE, said, “ZTE will continue to invest more in technologies, deepen the empowerment of industries, and adhere to technological innovations. As 5G gradually leaves the “comfort zone,” ZTE will tackle the pain points in the “stretch zone,” and provide operators and industry partners with more value and better services to accelerate the process of industry digitalization. ”

Throughout history, science & technology innovations and breakthroughs, supporting each great progress of the human society, has greatly improved the productivity of the human society, and also promoted the interconnections, interdependence, and development of economy, culture, and life.

Bai Gang stressed that ZTE always attaches great importance to and continues to invest in innovations in key technologies, including 3 following points.

Technical standards, key to defining the industry

As an important contributor to the standard field, ZTE has been ranked the world’s top 3 with 2561 5G SEP families. 5G strategic patents are over 6500. At the same time, we are concerned about what needs to be continuously enhanced in the current 5G network and vertical industries. In R17, we have invested heavily in key fields such as UL enhanced, RAN slicing and small data.

Core competitiveness, building the customer’s value foundation

Taking chips as an example, ZTE has 24 years of chip design and R&D experience, and has the full-process IC design capability from front-end architecture design to back-end physical implementation. At the same time, ZTE made breakthroughs in four key fields to achieve multi-core and heterogeneous SOC architecture innovation, and collaborated with software and hardware to achieve the best balance between performance and resources. In addition, ZTE has also continuously refined its overall core competitiveness in algorithms, architecture, and wireless product materials from multiple dimensions.

Innovative practice, maximizing the value of the industry

According to psychology research, people’s perception of the world is divided into “comfort zone,” “stretch zone,” and “stress zone.” In the “stretch zone,” we need to conquer the fields that we have not covered, and we will feel slightly uncomfortable with the challenge and exercise we have to do. However, we can overcome it. If we cannot overcome the stress, we will become a “stress zone”. We cannot learn but want to return to the “comfort zone.”

5G, for the first time in the history of communications technology development, plays a role other than that of communications, and stimulates the industry to reshape greater value. After 30 years of development, the “comfort zone” of ToC for consumer communication, we know clearly that we need to constantly follow the direction of the Shannon’s Theorem, and continuously pursue greater frequency efficiency, larger coverage and higher performance. In this field, every innovation in ZTE’s history solves the pain points better and achieves greater value for operators. For example, as a key 5G technology, Massive MIMO was first raised by ZTE in 2014, and was used to improve the performance of 4G network greatly, achieving large-scale commercialization. After six years of accumulated commercial use and continuous refinement, the performance of 5G network has been continuously improved. This year, the innovative SSB (Synchronization Signal and PBCH block) 1+X solution can increase the coverage of tall buildings up to 30%.

Facing the uncertain field of B2B, Bai Gang believes that we must enter the “stretch zone” so that 5G can better serve the B2B innovation in various industries with new technologies. ZTE is committed to being more flexible and efficient for various scenarios in various industries, and to driving industrial upgrade through technological innovation. For example, the ATG(Air-to-Ground) solution sets up in the sky a gigabit high-speed channel, so that the users can enjoy the same high-speed services on airplane as the ground. The flexible UPF(User Plane Funtion) can be flexibly deployed on different nodes of the 5G network on demand. The NodeEngine is a board-level mobile edge computing function for plug-and-play in the BBU, which can help enterprises to use the minimum cost and minimum time to complete the local deployment of campus digital applications and accelerate the pace of campus transformation. 5G energy consumption is one of the major concerns of operators.  PowerPilot, powered by AI, furthers our innovation in traditional power saving solutions to help base stations offer services to more power-efficient carrier or network without sacrificing user experience and to achieve the lowest per-bit power consumption possible.

ZTE also works on logistics, tourism, education, health, media and many other industries, covering a total of 15 industries, with over 500 partners to help pioneers in advanced industries to make digital transformation.

“In the future, we will continue to innovate in network performance enhancement, cost reduction, intelligent efficiency and B2B industry enhancement such as URLLC, TSN(Time Sensitive Network) and 5G LAN network.” Said Bai Gang.

It is true that we have only just drawn the curtain of large-scale 5G commercialization. The process of empowering the industry is bound to be full of challenges and hardships. “No road of flowers lead to glory– La Fontaine”. ZTE will continue to work together with its industry-wide partners to forge ahead and innovate, and turn every “stretch zone” into “comfort zone” to create greater value for the industry and customers, and embrace the bright spring of 5G applications.

Mr.Bai Gang
Vice General Manager of RAN Products
ZTE