ZTE's Award-Winning Minimalist Private 5G-A Solution

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At the recent GLOMO Awards 2025 during MWC 2025, ZTE’s Minimalist Private 5G-A solution earned the GSMA Foundry Innovation Award. This breakthrough solution has been deployed at major events—from the Chinese New Year Gala live broadcast that reached over 700 million viewers to Malaysia's 2024 Sukma Games and live interviews in collaboration with Mobile World Live at MWC Barcelona 2025. These deployments are setting new trends in industry transformation.

Setting the Stage

In today's rapidly evolving digital landscape, immersive experiences like free-roam VR are increasingly in demand. ZTE’s approach simplifies traditional complexities, creating an efficient, scalable solution tailored for indoor VR environments and live broadcasting.

The Free-Roam VR Challenge

Immersive VR experiences are becoming mainstream, with China hosting over 5,000 locations that offer free-roam VR for games, theatre, sports, and education. However, several challenges have held back seamless scalability:

  • Traditional Setups: Typically require users to wear a 5kg backpack for local image rendering, which is both cumbersome and prone to overheating.
  • Compromised Visuals: Lightweight VR headsets without these setups often deliver blurred imagery.
  • Wi-Fi Transmissions: Transmitting VR images via Wi-Fi suffers from limited simultaneous connections, leading to performance drops when many users connect at once.

The Minimalist 5G-Advanced Solution

ZTE’s solution overcomes these hurdles by leveraging a “minimalist private” 5G-Advanced network that eliminates the need for a conventional 5G core network. Key features include:

  • Edge Computing at the Base Station: VR traffic is terminated locally in the baseband unit, reducing deployment costs and complexity.
  • High-Frequency mmWave Spectrum: This enables high-speed data transmission with low latency.
  • Optimized Data Management: The network prioritizes critical video frames, uses adaptive bitrate techniques, and orchestrates network resources efficiently to manage multiple users simultaneously.
  • Performance Metrics:
    • Downlink speeds of 50–100 Mbps for numerous VR headsets
    • End-to-end latency under 50 ms
    • Lightweight, smartphone-sized devices now deliver rendered VR videos directly to headsets, significantly enhancing user comfort and mobility.

Real-World Deployments and Impact

ZTE’s innovative solution has been demonstrated and deployed in several high-profile scenarios:

  • China Joy 2024, Shanghai: High-performance VR streaming in a bustling exhibition environment.
  • Beijing SoReal Experience: Delivered 4K video streams at 90 frames per second with latency under 15 ms.
  • Chengdu VR Theatre: Supported downlink speeds exceeding 80 Mbps for 40 simultaneous users with latency under 20 ms.

Beyond VR, the architecture is ideally suited for live broadcasting:

  • Chinese Spring Festival Gala 2024: Enabled a five-hour broadcast with zero packet loss, supporting 2 Gbps video streams per camera, and attracting 432 million views—a 48% increase over the previous year.
  • Malaysia’s National Games: Offered flexible camera placement and rapid setup, completed in just a single day.
  • Global Expansion: Collaborations with partners in Belgium and Austria signal further deployments on the horizon.

Future Prospects

The growth of immersive VR and high-resolution broadcasting is set to drive the adoption of minimalist 5G-Advanced networks. Factors that will influence future deployments include:

  • mmWave Spectrum Availability: Regional variations in spectrum access will shape deployment strategies.
  • Advancements in Recording Technologies: The evolution toward 4K and 8K recording underscores the need for flexible, high-capacity connectivity solutions.

Conclusion

ZTE’s minimalist 5G-Advanced network offers a transformative solution for both VR and live broadcasting applications. With its streamlined architecture, high performance, and scalability, it not only addresses the current challenges but also sets the stage for future technological advancements.

You can read more about the solution in the GSMA Foundry Case Study here.

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