Chinese vendor ZTE is hoping to position itself as a one-stop-shop for operators looking to dip their toes into 5G.
As we get closer to the finalisation of the 5G standard and the inevitable race to claim marketing kudos from being the 5G first mover, operators must be puzzling over how much money to chuck at it. You have to be seen to be getting involved but how much return are those initial investments likely to yield.
Perhaps in anticipation of this ZTE has launched what it calls ‘a total solution designed to accelerate the pre5G evolution for 5G-ready networks.’ In an apparent show of empathy with its CSP customers ZTE says this total Pre5G solution in in line with its philosophy of ‘enjoying the present, co-building the future’, and who can argue with that?
Essentially ZTE is saying it gets the fact that 5G will be an incremental business with bits of technology added as and when they’re ready and there is demand for them. While 5G is expected to offer wireless exotica such as narrowband and low latencies, in the mid-term it’s likely to be mainly about extra bandwidth, or specifically eMBB. So ZTE wants us to know it’s all over stuff like Massive MIMO and that sort of thing.
Other than that ZTE left now buzzword unturned in its insistence that it’s all over 5G and stressed how intimately involved in that standardisation process it has been. While we don’t doubt that’s all true, similar claims are also being made by all ZTE’s competitors, so this announcement has limited value as a point of differentiation.
In other news ZTE is guiding that its profits for the first 9 months of the year are around 37% up year-on-year on revenues that were up just 7%, implying it’s been on a bit of an efficiency drive.