China Unicom first tested Huawei’s 5G Super Uplink on its commercial networks in 2020
China Unicom and Huawei announced last week that they have deployed Huawei’s 5G Super Uplink at more than 1,000 5G commercial sites in Beijing. The deployment, which was carried out over five days, is part of the pair’s joint 5G Capital project established in April 2020.
By using TDD 3.5 GHz and FDD 2.1 GHz coordination, high- and low-band complementation, time- and frequency-domain aggregation and millisecond-level resource scheduling, 5G Super Uplink significantly improves uplink capabilities and can meet the high network requirements of services such as short video upload and HD live broadcast, Huawei said. The network equipment vendor has said that the Super Uplink capability enables the “full potential of high and low frequency bands through TDD and FDD collaboration, and by enabling innovative time- and frequency-domain aggregation … eliminates the uplink speed bottleneck to deliver higher upload rates and improved image quality for popular services such as streaming and gaming.”
Further, according to Fan Liqun, head of China Unicom Beijing’s 5G co-construction and sharing work team, 5G Super Uplink is “up to [the] task” when it comes to providing the “ultimate” user experience during the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics and Paralympics.
“Its large-scale commercial deployment at 1,000 of our sites is another major innovation milestone of the 5G Capital project,” he continued. “China Unicom Beijing will continue to innovate together with Huawei and apply good 5G technologies on commercial networks to better serve our customers and improve their experience.”
China Unicom first tested 5G Super Uplink on its commercial networks in 2020 in Beijing, followed by a small-scale deployment in May 2021. According to the operator, the technology resulted in an increase of 10% to 40% in the overall uplink rate of Super Uplink users and a three-fold increase in the uplink rate of cell edge users.
“TDD+FDD networking will find its way into networks globally, and 5G Super Uplink is a key example, showing that collaboration between TDD and FDD is key to the development of higher quality 5G networks,” commented Ma Hongbo, president of Huawei’s SingleRAN Product Line. “Huawei is happy to have helped China Unicom Beijing deploy Super Uplink at such a scale, in over a thousand sites, and will further support China Unicom Beijing in its vision to continuously build high-quality 5G networks. These networks will act as benchmarks for all operators looking to develop 5G.”
China Unicom first revealed its 5G subscriber numbers at the end of 2020, claiming 70.8 million 5G package subscribers at the time.
