ZTE’s SDR BTS Landed in the Western European Market

We chose ZTE Uni RAN solution to cover the central region of Portugal, not only to upgrade the existing networks, but also to prepare for the future evolution of LTE, staying ahead of the competition.

Mr José Pinto Correia, CTO of Optimus

SONAE is the largest non-financial enterprise in Portugal. The mobile branch “Optimus” is a joint venture telecom operator owned by Portuguese SONAE Group and France Telecom. Optimus occupies the second place in fixed-line and the third place in Portuguese mobile communication market. On 22th, December 2009, ZTE officially signed GSM/UMTS/LTE network construction contract with Optimus by using SDR BTS to swap existing equipments.

Uni RAN Solution Reducing CAPEX&OPEX

Comparing with the existing network, the new solution reduces both CAPEX and OPEX.As GSM/UMTS/LTE triple-modes can be supported in one SDR BTS, site space and power consumption are both greatly reduced saving lots of OPEX.

Fast Deployment

ZTE offers efficient project management team and professional project management process for Optimus to rapidly deliver the prime-quality network. Additionally, ZTE also provides highly experienced international engineering service to ensure strict and professional project implementation. Optimus has very strict rules for swap project. All the swap projects were required to be finished in 3 months with high quality. ZTE used 20 engineering teams to swap 250 sites simultaneously. It took only ten days for ZTE’s engineering team to put through the first call, starting from the very first day of equipment installation. With high quality products and well organized project management ZTE has shown strong capability of project delivery which was highly appreciated by Sonaecom.

Smooth Network Evolution

Based on one platform, the SDR BTS supports GSM/UMTS/LTE multi-mode co-site, co-transmission, co-management, co-site installation and co-rack. The 1T2R radio unit offered in solution can be upgraded to support HSPA+ only by software upgrade and by adding new radio unit to realize MIMO function for LTE.

Excellent Network Performance

Sonaecom held a very high expectation on the network performance improvement. With solid accumulation in 2G and 3G radio access network technologies, profound understanding of KPI methodologies and self-developed network optimization tools, ZTE pretty well lifted the overall KPI of the network.