India Bharti and Huawei complete 5G microwave enhanced MIMO joint innovation

Sep 29, 2019

[Delhi, India, September 29, 2019] Bharti India and Huawei jointly started innovation for enhanced MIMO solution of 5G microwave. Bharti India then deployed more than 100 hops of enhanced MIMO microwave link based on the latest MIMO technology developed by Huawei, which will deliver 1Gbps capacity over single 28Mhz spectrum, improving the backhaul capacity by four times.

Adding CA technology to 1Gbps enhanced MIMO link will smoothly upgrade it to 2Gbps MIMO link with additional 28Mhz spectrum. This is made possible by Huawei’s innovative 5G CA (Carrier Aggregation) ODU’s simplified architecture, saving power consumption by 20% and reducing tower rental fee by 50% while achieving maximum transmission distance of up to 13 km. After half year’s observation, enhanced MIMO link are working stably with commercial traffic in Bharti’s live network.

India Bharti cooperates with Huawei to launch the enhanced MIMO solution

Microwave is the biggest and most important transmission solution for Bharti. To enhance leadership in India market, Bharti faces the problem of how to significantly improve microwave transmission bandwidth under limited frequency resources. To solve this problem, Huawei proposes enhanced MIMO solution, which resolves the bandwidth challenges, reduces tower space requirement by 50% and increases deployment scenario by 30%.

Bharti implements the largest-scale MIMO deployment around the world. Huawei's 5G enhanced MIMO technology has been optimized to reduce the Rayleigh distance of LOS (Line of Sight) MIMO. Comparing with standard MIMO solution in microwave industry, the antenna installation distance is reduced by 70% and multipath interference of long-distance links is resolved to ensure MIMO links work stably. Large scale commercial deployment of MIMO is possible with Huawei enhanced MIMO solution.

MIMO technology achieves four times capacity with same spectrum. In this way, telecom operator can build 5G ready transport network without extra spectrum investment. Huawei’s enhanced MIMO solution can reduce the antenna installation distance criteria, simplify MIMO deployment and reduce TCO. Perry Yang, President of Microwave Product Line of Huawei, said, "Creating value for customers with innovative technologies is the survival reason for Huawei microwave. Huawei microwave is looking forward to joint innovation with more operators for network development."