ZTE has announced the world’s first commercial LTE micro base station. It said the ZXSDR BS8920 also has the largest capacity of any LTE micro base station, offering 150Mbps with 2X10W transmit power and 2T4R modulation for a large footprint.

According to Chinese telco major, the micro base station is targeted at the “rapidly growing  market for urban and indoor hotspot coverage and can reduce hardware costs by up to 50 per cent of distributed base stations.” In addition, the technology offers reduced power consumption to “as low as 100W average” with up to 30 per cent lower deployment costs over other distributed base stations.

It said the base station supports all standard LTE frequency bands and power supplies as well as meeting industry requirements for “an Omni sector eNodeB product.” The new micro base station can be deployed in LTE networks as well as hybrid ones, covering complex environments such as hotspots and blindspots. The unit can be mounted on walls, poles or masts and offers LTE baseband processing and Radio Frequency functions within a single module, integrated into a small enclosure unit suitable for both indoor and outdoor use.

As of April this year, ZTE had deployed 70 LTE trial networks with partners globally and signed 18 LTE commercial contractors with operators around the world.