Blue Won­der Com­mu­ni­ca­tions' BWC200 Passed First IOT Tests again­st ZTE En­vi­ron­ment

Ma­tur­ing Qual­i­ty Proven So­lu­tions for LTE Net­works

Blue Won­der Com­mu­ni­ca­tions - the in­de­pen­dent de­sign house and li­cen­sor of LTE-IP and sys­tem so­lu­tions - has en­tered in­to the in­ter­op­er­abil­i­ty test­ing phase with its re­cent­ly an­nounced LTE IP pro­duct BWC200. Dur­ing this test ses­sion again­st ZTE's test en­vi­ron­ment the BWC200 has suc­cess­ful­ly passed uplink, down­link and syn­chro­niza­tion tests via an­ten­na over the air at up to 20 MHz band­width.

"Blue Won­der stands for lead­ing-edge LTE IP with high­est qual­i­ty. The in­ter­op­er­abil­i­ty test­ing is an im­por­tant step to prove the ma­tu­ri­ty of our IP prod­ucts", states Dr. Wol­fram Drescher, Manag­ing Di­rec­tor at Blue Won­der Com­mu­ni­ca­tions. "We are de­light­ed to have ZTE as a well equipped and ex­pe­ri­enced part­ner to sup­port us dur­ing this test­ing phase."

In­ter­op­er­abil­i­ty test­ing (IOT) is a mea­sure to prove the abil­i­ty of com­mu­ni­ca­tion sys­tems to op­er­ate in a re­al en­vi­ron­ment seam­less­ly and in­ter­fer­ence-free to­geth­er with other sys­tems. For LTE so­lu­tions it con­sists main­ly of 3GPP stan­dard con­for­mance tests and of tests again­st LTE base sta­tions - al­so called eN­ode B's. In ZTE Lab, com­mer­cial eN­ode B equip­ment con­sists of ZXS­DR 800MHz band RRU and mul­ti-mode BBU which are in­volved in­to the IOT. ZTE LTE eN­ode B is shar­ing the com­mon ra­dio hard­ware plat­form. This com­mon hard­ware re­source pool has most at­trac­tive fea­tures like the SDR (soft­ware de­fined ra­dio) and base­band. The pro­duct de­sign tar­get is re­con­fig­ur­ing to dif­fer­ent Ra­dio Ac­cess Tech­nol­o­gy on­ly by soft­ware and with­out change to the hard­ware. The fo­cus of the re­cent BWC200 test ses­sion was on FDD mode (fre­quen­cy di­vi­sion du­plex­ing). Blue Won­der's BWC200 LTE IP pro­duct is a TDD/FDD mul­ti­mode so­lu­tion, up to cat­e­go­ry 4. It's been pre-val­i­dat­ed on the Blue Won­der de­vel­op­ment plat­form Blue­Gate that is ca­pable of run­ning in com­mon fre­quen­cy bands in the range of 700 MHz to 2700 MHz in both TDD and FDD mod­es (e.g. band 5, band 20, band 38). BWC200 rep­re­sents a com­plete LTE sub­sys­tem that can easi­ly be in­te­grat­ed in Sys­tem-on-Chip (SoC) plat­forms. It is avail­able for li­censees now. The IOT was suc­cess­ful­ly passed and indi­cates the open­ing of the 800MHz band LTE era.

"Blue Won­der is the first com­pa­ny to test equip­ment again­st ZTE' LTE tech­nol­o­gy since we opened the new test lab in Düs­sel­dorf' s test and in­no­va­tion cen­ter in March 2010" ex­plains Michael Stück­mann, COO of the ZTE Voda­fone Busi­ness Unit. "The fact that we are con­duct­ing tests with LTE IP prod­ucts in Ger­many shows that we are strength­en­ing our R&D ca­pac­i­ties in the Eu­ro­pean Mar­ket and that we are ready to help the op­er­a­tors with the roll-out of 4G tech­nol­o­gy. All our cus­tomers will prof­it from the in­ter­op­er­abil­i­ty tests we are do­ing in our test lab", un­der­li­nes Michael Stück­mann.