Huawei, a leading global information and communications technology (ICT) solutions provider, has announced that it has been selected by Portuguese mobile operator Optimus to provide UMTS/LTE multi-frequency antennas for its LTE commercial network.

The commercialization of Huawei's antennas in Portugal extends the current mobile network portfolio and will boost the overall prosperity of the European LTE market.

The coexistence of multi-format and multi-band technologies supporting GSM/UMTS/LTE networks has created great challenges for antenna deployment. With limited site space available, operators must choose multi-band antennas, which also provide efficient deployment and maintenance costs while meeting the technical requirements of the network rollout.

Using Huawei's multi-band (1800MHz/2100MHz/2600MHz) antennas, Optimus added LTE operation while maintaining the number of antennas, minimizing rental and infrastructure costs and retaining minimal visual impact. Tests on existing networks showed that Huawei's antennas not only save on deployment and maintenance costs but also effectively improve the system throughput, capacity and overall network performance.

Jos? Pinto Correia, CTO of Optimus, said: "Huawei antennas showed great performance on existing network tests, which gave us more confidence in LTE network deployment. Optimus is committed to enhancing user experience for mobile broadband, hence Huawei has been our strategic partner in mobile broadband development since 2005."

Zhou Taoyuan, Huawei Wireless Network Business Unit President for Antenna and IBS Solutions, said, "Huawei has put forward a 3S strategy (Single, Synergy and Soft) in order to unify and fully automate the production platform to meet the requirements of operators for MBB network capacity and performance."