ZTE has achieved 17.9 percent LTE infrastructure market share in 2013, said IHS.
The Chinese telecom equipment vendor is one of the three LTE equipment vendors in the world, the report said.
In 2013, China witnessed the construction of more 4G networks than the rest of the world combined, with ZTE becoming China’s largest LTE solution provider.
ZTE gained the largest share of the tender for China Mobile’s 4G-LTE Phase I Project, with 26 percent. In the tender for the main equipment for China Telecom’s 4G-LTE Network Project, ZTE gained around 40 percent share, and placed its LTE products in 90 percent of the target provinces. In addition, ZTE won the tenders for core network construction in 15 provinces, autonomous regions, and municipalities.
In the global market, ZTE helped many large telecom operators such as VimpelCom, KPN and Telenor to launch their commercial LTE networks in countries including Russia, Belgium and Hungary.
ZTE is a global leader in the commercial construction of TD-LTE networks. According to the IHS report, ZTE took the leading place in the shipment of Evolved Node B (eNodeB) equipment with more than 70,000 units shipped.
By the end of 2013, ZTE had constructed pilot and commercial TD-LTE networks for 66 leading operators in 40 countries, with 35 TD-LTE commercial contracts in Europe, India, CIS, Asia-Pacific, Southeast Asia and America. Some of these contracts have been commercially launched including Airtel India, and Hi3G of Sweden.
Cloud Radio
In February 2013 ZTE launched Cloud Radio that helps improve LTE network performance through cloud collaboration and cloud scheduling to offer users a seamless mobile experience and operators 4G+ network performance through self-adaptive collaboration.
Cloud Radio has been adopted by operators including China Mobile and Hong Kong’s CSL. In July 2013, ZTE cooperated with China Mobile to launch a TD-LTE network with Cloud Radio in Guangzhou. In this project, ZTE achieved network-level cross-station cloud collaboration without network upgrades via a third-party packet transport network (PTN), an industry first.
Voice over LTE
In June 2013, ZTE conducted the first VoLTE call on China Mobile’s TD-LTE network in Guangzhou. This implementation marked an industry breakthrough in the provision of TD-LTE voice solutions. In December 2013, ZTE partnered with CSL to launch an eSRVCC VoLTE network, which helped improve the usage of network spectrums to increase network capacity and optimize user experience.
As a major developer of the 3GPP system architecture evolution (SAE) and LTE specifications, ZTE has issued 815 SAE and LTE patent statements (13 percent of the global statements in this field) in the IPR database of the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI).
By the end of December 2013, ZTE had won 140 LTEEPC commercial contracts from around the world.