Han Ling, ZTE's vice president, said, “Three peaks will appear as the total mobile broadband traffic consumption grows. First, as the traffic consumption of individuals grows towards mobility, mobile Internet users will overtake fixed users to become the Internet’s primary users. Second, as the intranet traffic consumption of enterprises grows towards mobility, mobile workforces and bring your own device (BYOD) will become increasingly popular as the development of LTE scales”.

“Third, as data communication develops from person-to-person to person-to-machine and machine-to-machine, the number of network connections will reach 50 to 100 billion, and the mobile Internet of everything will become a reality. During the growth of mobile broadband traffic consumption, the ability to provide ubiquitous access, elastic network, and digital service is vital for telecom operators.”

Mobile networks must develop in order to cope with the rapid growth of mobile traffic consumption. In 2014, ZTE announced its Pre 5G concept, in which mature 5G technologies are deployed on 4G networks before 2020 to upgrade existing networks and to cope with challenges brought by rapid data traffic growth. Pre 5G consists of four key technologies: Massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO), Pre5G user densification network (UDN), multi-user shared access (MUSA), and integrated software defined networks (SDN).

At Mobile World Congress 2015 in Barcelona, ZTE released its industry-leading Pre5G 3D Massive MIMO pre-commercial base station. This base station increases spectrum efficiency by 4 to 6 times, achieves accurate 3D beam forming, and is completely compatible with current commercial 4G terminals.

5G's key features, such as experience rate of 100 Mbps-1 Gbps, traffic density of 10 Tbps/km2 at hot spots, millions of connections per square kilometer, low delay, and high liability, will meet people's requirements on high traffic density, connection density, and mobility. 5G network construction will greatly reduce energy consumption, increase operational cost efficiency, improve service innovation capability, and expand space for telecom operation industry.

ZTE believes that key to the development of a telecom network is to construct a horizontally-layered and software-defined elastic network that supports integrated control and unified management by introducing SDN/network function virtualization (NFV) architecture, IP and optical network convergence, and content delivery networks (CDN)/enhanced service choreography capability. As the information architecture continuously evolves, the convergence of cloud and tube becomes the core feature of an elastic network.