Malaysia's U Mobile has partnered with ZTE for the development of pre5G mobile broadband technologies.
The partnership will help U Mobile deliver substantial network performance upgrades using ZTE’s proprietary pre5G technologies including Massive MIMO (multiple input multiple output). The partnership also covers collaboration between the two companies on research and development of 5G technologies, in addition to Pre5G.
ZTE claims that its Pre5G base station enhances spectral efficiency of current 4G LTE networks between four to six times by using Massive MIMO technology.
Being known as the data-centric telco, 70% of U Mobile subscribers are smartphone users. Looking at the recent consumer behavior study in early 2015, the Malaysian public spends an average of 3 hours and 39 minutes browsing the Internet for work, information, searching and entertainment, which is ranked the highest in the South East Asia region.
ZTE’s collaboration on Pre5G research with U Mobile follows the announcements of similar partners with SoftBank in Japan, and KT in Korea.