South African telecommunications services provider Telkom, in partnership with multinational ICT firm Huawei, recently demonstrated a 2.3GHz LTE TDD Massive MIMO (Advanced Multiple Antenna System) on Telkom's network.

The demo, conducted by Huawei, was based on a 20MHz bandwidth on Telkom's network and reached 909 Mbps at peak rate.

According to Telkom although 4G networks have already delivered significantly higher data rates and a whole new range of services and applications for consumers, the demand for data continues to grow.

"This is where Massive MIMO can assist networks," it added. "Mobile customers can achieve data at a rate up to five times faster than current 4G technology. This will result in better throughput speeds and improved coverage."

Veni Shone, President of Huawei's LTE Solution said: "It was a very exciting opportunity to work with Telkom to demonstrate this brand new wireless technology. Although services nowadays are more diverse and require higher network capacity to improve the user's experience; we were able to deliver capacity using extremely simplified network architecture. Massive MIMO is definitely playing a significant role in it to meet future network requirements."

According to Telkom Massive MIMO technology will enable the company to reuse existing sites to meet high data demand at a lower cost, rather than having to acquire and build new sites in dense areas.

"In turn, this will enable Telkom to offer larger data packages and more services at a reduced cost," it added.

While Telkom confirmed plans to deploy the technology this year, it has not offered any further details.