Huawei makes TDD active antenna units live

Huawei has made the first deployment of its LTE TDD 8T8R active antenna unit (AAU), which it said increases the cell edge download rate by 55 percent in field tests.

The vendor deployed the unit in conjunction with China Mobile in Hebei, China. Its range of AAU products bring together the antenna unit and remote radio unit into one box, which Huawei said improves the efficiency of installation, reducing maintenance costs as well as the amount of site space that was previously needed for two separate boxes.

The implementation marks the commercial availability of its AAU products for 4G LTE-TDD networks. Huawei has deployed its AAU products for FDD-enabled operators in more than 10 countries including the UK, Germany, Singapore and Russia. China Mobile said it expects to deploy the 8T8R on a large scale in the “near future”.

Huawei said the new product would bolster its LTE offering, with the vendor having signed more than 300 commercial contracts by the end of June 2014 and deployed more than 140 commercial 4G LTE networks.

Among the recent 4G projects Huawei has been working on is a project with the UK’s EE and Qualcomm to test LTE broadcast at the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow and building a separate LTE broadcast network with Vodafone Germany for the Kieler Woche boat race.

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