Turkcell and Huawei Commercial Verification of BBU5900 Base Station Marks Launch of 5G Evolution

[Shenzhen, China, January 24, 2018] Turkcell and Huawei have successfully verified Huawei’s 5G-oriented new Generation BBU5900 base station on a commercial network in Antalya Turkey opening the way for roll out of 5G evolution.

The BBU5900 has three distinctive features: "Six Modes in One Box", "Very Large Transmission Capacity" and "Extreme 5G-oriented Evolution". It is the designed to meet the future requirements of multi-band, multi-RAT and multi-service converged networks. Turkcell’s focus is on deploying the latest, advanced products in its network and this next generation BBU will help the carrier build a solid foundation for the evolution of network infrastructure capabilities. Turkcell sees the Huawei BBU giving it an early mover advantage to seize opportunities in the 5G era.

As Turkey's major wireless operator, Turkcell has also signed an MOU with Huawei to develop TechCity2.0. The MOU calls for Turkcell and Huawei to jointly validate and deploy the most advanced technologies and solutions on the market, to build a 5G-oriented basic network, to meet the diverse business needs of the future, and to continuously enhance the user experience.

Successful verification of Huawei’s next-generation BBU5900 on the Turkcell commercial network is a first for Eurasia. As such, it marks the beginning of a multi-service converged infrastructure network in the region. Deploying the BBU5900 to support LTE wireless broadband service expansion and NB-IoT services provides the capability to rapidly introduce 5G NR with uplink and downlink decoupling to achieve low-cost deployment and seamless coverage of 5G NR and LTE co-site location in the future.

Huawei's next-generation BBU5900 features include: BBU baseband unit box "6 in 1", with 6 mode (GSM, UMTS, LTE FDD, LTE TDD, NB-IoT, 5G NR) in one box; transmission capacity of 50Gbps to meet the requirements of multi-band, multi-mode and Massive MIMO co-site deployment; with a series of multi-antenna RF modules supporting 4T4R/8T8R/64T64R, extreme user experience in the 4.5G/5G era.

"The future network is bound to be a multi-band, multi-RAT network,” said Jiang Xiangzhong, President of Huawei’s SingleRAN Product Line. “Operators should pay special attention to managing this complicated network to meet diverse business and user experience demands in the future." Typical base stations around the BBU5900 enable 5G-oriented smooth evolution to create a unified and efficient platform to build multi-band, multi-RAT converged networks that help operators in the 4.5G/5G era construct highly competitive networks more efficiently."

Gediz Sezgin, Turkcell’s Chief Network Officer, said, "5G evolution of network planning in advance is very necessary. This cooperation with Huawei on commercial verification of the BBU5900 was one of our implementation examples for the 5G basic network. We will continue to carry out the most advanced technology validation, to lead the market, and to provide customers with better a network experience. ”