Partnership is continuing with Drei Austria and ZTE commercializing 5G Standalone
Internationally-recognized mobile network performance benchmarking firm Ookla has recognized Hutchinson Drei Austria as having the fastest 5G network in the country for three consecutive quarters. In the latest period, Ookla speedtests found that the operator delivered median 5G download speeds of 267.86 Mbps and median upload speeds of 22.26 Mbps.
According to Drei Austria CTO Matthias Baldermann, this is the result of a holistic 5G strategy that makes most efficiency use of its spectrum holdings and network resources. “We decided to upgrade each and every single base station in our network to 5G,” he told RCR Wireless News. “We’re doing that with a very comprehensive rollout program we’ve set up. We utilized and installed at every single site powerful massive MIMO antennas.”
Baldermann continued: “Obviously we’re happy to see also in market benchmarking that we’re good…To win the Ookla speedtest award three times in sequence, that’s obviously something that proves us right in our way…We also take it as an honor and as a recognition for the team for the hard work they all did…It’s a result of a strong team play with rollout partners [and] with ZTE as equipment supplier. We’ve been working together for many years. There are no secrets—just focus, commitment and strong team play.”
ZTE Austria Managing Director Kurt Manninger noted the deployment challenge represented by the COVID-19 pandemic which had broad impacts on international travel, supply chain resiliency and business continuity. In terms of delivering the 5G network with Drei Austria, Manninger called out the key roles of a cloud delivery center at ZTE headquarters connected to country-level project teams and tools developed for beta configuration, network optimizations and other customer-facing business processes. He said ZTE is “really eager and keen to work together…in the future to enhance the network quality and network modernization.”
Throughout 2022, Drei Austria, ZTE and other partners have been hard at work on commercializing 5G STandalone, including adding aggregation of a 700 MHz coverage layer with supplemental downlink in band 400 MHz to improve rural throughput.
Manninger said that past, present and future work with Drei Austria is laser-focused on improving experience for customers with consideration of building future-ready networks. “WE are really keen to deploy always very high quality networks and be innovative as needed, and more innovative even than the current customer needs,” he said. “We try to anticipate all those needs and we deployed also a lot of new technologies, including 5G network slicing, we have carrier aggregation, and just recently presented commercialization of 5G Standalone which will improve the 5G user experience. I think that’s by the end of the day the most important thing. We’re doing all this to improve the customer experience.”
