U.S. carriers Verizon and Qualcomm have already completed large-scale MIMO testing of LTE-Advanced technology, which will bring significant network speed improvements to Android handsets next year.
The test uses Ericsson's antenna hardware and a prototype phone running Qualcomm's new Snapdragon 845 chip and X20 modem, demonstrating for the first time that mass-market MIMO is demonstrated on consumer devices.
Nicola Palmer, Verizon's chief network engineer and head of wireless networks, said: "Massive MIMO is an important part of 4G LTE and will play an important role in 5G technology to reduce the number of unit delays in billions of connections and increase their Scalability.
MIMO, Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) means that multiple transmit antennas and receive antennas are respectively used at the transmitting end and the receiving end to transmit and receive signals through multiple antennas at the transmitting end and the receiving end, so as to improve Communication quality.
This technology is currently the most widely used home Wi-Fi network, the type is usually 2 × 2 or 3 × 3 antenna, that is, for sending and receiving two or three antennas.Magnetic MIMO uses the same concept, And turn it all the way.
Verizon did not say how many antennas were used in the test, but large-scale MIMO usually means orders of magnitude higher than in the prior art.
The best news for the moment is that all the technologies used in the testing will be available in the first half of next year, which means that there may be a very big stride forward in next year's handset speeds.
