China Unicom Shandong and Huawei jointly launch China's first low-latency trial project in Jinan

[Jinan, China, June 25, 2018] China Unicom Shandong and Huawei launched China's first low-latency trial project for mobile games in Jinan, with the latest LTE low-latency solution put into use. The trial area witnessed a decrease in latency for mobile gaming by up to 50%, which solves the problem of frame freezing and delay in hot spot locations.

China Unicom Shandong is constantly dedicated to improving user experience through continuous innovation in LTE technology. The cooperation with Huawei is an initiative designed to optimize the overall mobile gaming experience based on network pain points. Especially within the trial area, the industry is desperately seeking to enhance the user experience for increasingly popular mobile games. During peak hours when the number of online mobile gamers significantly increases, the average gaming latency exceeded 180 ms, which caused frame freezing and delay.

Against this backdrop, China Unicom Shandong partnered with Huawei to enable the advanced scheduling and acceleration solution for the LTE air interface. This solution improves scheduling priority for mobile games and flexibly configures power-saving sleep periods to cut the service scheduling wait time and retransmission latency. After this solution takes effect, the average gaming latency of assured users is reduced by a maximum of 50% (from 180 ms to 90 ms). Network latency is much more stable, with the proportion of gamers whose latency exceeds 100 ms being reduced by a half. The frame freezing and delay derived from such latency is no longer considered to be such a worrying concern.

Mobile games have become the third mainstream mobile service following voice and video. China Unicom Shandong aims to provide superlative user experience through relentless efforts in innovation. The collaboration with Huawei in the LTE low-latency field plays an important role in improving user experience and incubate new business models. China Unicom Shandong will continue cooperating with Huawei to ensure the further development of the trial project, while promoting the tests and verification of a diverse range of LTE low-latency technologies (including Short TTI defined in 3GPP R15). The aim is to establish a nationwide benchmark for low-latency network experience.

Chen Chuanfei, Vice President of Huawei LTE Product Line, said: "LTE low latency is a new trend for future network development. It not only improves experience for conventional services, but also holds strong significance in enabling new services. We will strengthen our cooperation with China Unicom Shandong in pursuing more innovative low-latency solutions in order to deliver an optimal user experience. It is hoped that together we can realize the healthy development of the low-latency industry chain, including the network, terminals, and chips."