China Mobile, the largest telecom operator in the world, has rolled out its VoLTE HD voice services in Zhejiang with the support of Huawei.
Zhejiang is the first province in China to offer VoLTE services. Huawei recently bagged nearly half of China Mobile’s nationwide VoLTE project. Huawei will deploy VoLTE networks in developed coastal provinces as well as metropolitan cities, including Beijing, Shanghai, and Shenzhen.
Meanwhile, China Mobile, Huawei and Qualcomm Technologies completed the verification of Uplink Data Compression (UDC), a TDD+ technology, on a LTE-TDD commercial network.
UDC enables telecom operators to maximize LTE-TDD uplink resources, increasing the number of uplink users and achieving compression efficiency for various applications such as WeChat, and other services including web browsing. The use of UDC reduces the latency of Internet surfing for mobile users, particularly in areas where performance is less than satisfactory, e.g. at the periphery of coverage.
TDD+, a part of 4.5G, can utilize MBB speed of up to xGbps level based on existing and future LTE TDD features such as Massive MIMO, 3D Beamforming, 256QAM, and UDC.
UDC offers an uplink efficiency improvement. The LTE modem in the terminal compresses the uplink data at the LTE lower layers based on different conditions and application traffic, reducing the data transmitted over the air as well as the respective interference generated by the device.
This results in high compression gains reducing the uplink resource consumption and increase the overall uplink system capacity by 50 percent.
Uplink Data Compression is easy to deploy without requiring any hardware upgrade. On the network side, operators need to upgrade the eNB software. On the terminal side, this technology is implemented in the LTE modem and independent from the mobile phone’s operation system.
Qualcomm Technologies’ next generation LTE modems are expected to support this, while Huawei’s eNB solutions ready for commercial release later this year.
Baburajan K
editor@telecomlead.com
