ZTE and Airtel Gabon Put an FDD Plus TDD Massive MIMO Unit Into Commercial Service, With a 107 Percent Throughput Gain

ZTE and Airtel Gabon have put what they call the industry’s first FDD plus TDD Massive MIMO solution into commercial service on Airtel’s live network in Libreville. The deployment combines FDD and TDD bands into a single active antenna unit, and the companies report a 107 percent improvement in user throughput at site level, a 20 percent increase in traffic capacity and a 41 percent improvement in physical resource block utilisation efficiency. At the 2.6 GHz layer the gains are larger: 86 percent throughput, 92 percent capacity and 60 percent PRB efficiency.

The engineering point is the single unit. Running FDD and TDD through one AAU instead of separate radios is what allows the claimed spectrum and energy gains, because the scheduler can treat both bands as one pool. That is the part other vendors will be watching, since the same logic applies wherever an operator holds both FDD and TDD spectrum in the same market.

Gabon is the test case here. The country is accelerating digital infrastructure on the back of mobile broadband growth, digital finance, e-government, online education and cloud services, and operators there are dealing with the usual constraints: expanding capacity and coverage while improving spectrum efficiency and cutting energy use. Airtel Gabon’s network is being positioned for future 5G services off the back of this 4G evolution step. A standalone 5G launch is not part of this announcement.

The numbers are vendor-reported from a single live network, so they describe one operator’s outcome. A 107 percent throughput gain on one site configuration does not translate to every site, and the comparison is against the previous network configuration, not against a competitor’s product. What the deployment does establish is that the integrated approach is commercially deployable at scale, which is a different claim from the headline figure.

The broader signal is about spectrum reuse. Operators across Africa and other emerging markets hold fragmented FDD and TDD assets, and a unit that merges them into one radio is a direct answer to that constraint. Whether the approach spreads depends on whether other vendors ship comparable integrated units and whether operators can absorb the swap cost. GSMA figures put sub-Saharan African mobile internet users at roughly 300 million, with 4G still the dominant access technology, so the addressable base for this kind of 4G evolution step is large.

Supplier’s note: We stock ZTE and third-party Massive MIMO AAUs for 4G and 5G evolution projects, and we can supply FDD plus TDD integrated units with comparable band combinations for operators looking to reuse existing spectrum. Lead time on integrated AAUs from our Shenzhen stock is eight to ten weeks, and we hold buffer stock of the ZTE 64T64R and 32T32R units for customers running 2.6 GHz evolution projects. For operators planning a 4G to 5G evolution path, send us your current band plan and site count and we will come back with a unit-level proposal and a swap schedule that keeps the network live during the changeover. We have supported three African operators through similar evolution programmes in the last two years, and the changeover window is usually the part that determines whether the project finishes on time, and most delays come from site access, and we plan for that in every proposal, with a site-access checklist sent before the first truck rolls.