MTN and ZTE Deploy World’s First Commercial 5-Band RRU in South Africa
ZTE Corporation and MTN have announced the commercial deployment of the world’s first 5-band Remote Radio Unit (RRU) in South Africa’s Western Cape Province — a milestone the companies say will boost network performance, simplify site deployment and improve energy efficiency across mobile sites.
As one of Africa’s largest telecom markets, South Africa serves a population of more than 60 million people; MTN currently covers over 97% of the population with LTE.
With demand rising for multi-band, multi-module services, operators face growing constraints on power, tower load and space. The new 5-band RRU aims to address those constraints by consolidating multiple frequency functions into a single, compact unit.
Built around ZTE’s in-house chipset, the 5-band RRU integrates MTN South Africa’s low- and mid-band FDD frequencies into one device. According to ZTE and MTN, the unit halves the number of RAN radio-frequency modules on towers, reduces equipment weight by 23% and cuts wind resistance by 18%, measures that streamline site construction and free up valuable tower real estate.
The RRU also incorporates ZTE’s Super-N amplifier architecture, which uses dense arrays of power amplifiers with on-demand activation to sustain high efficiency across variable traffic loads, an approach the companies say overcomes efficiency limits of traditional Doherty amplifiers. ZTE and MTN report the design yields a 42.7% reduction in overall site power consumption and a 45.8% improvement in energy efficiency (Wh/GB).
Taken together, these gains are intended to lower deployment complexity and operating costs while supporting greener, lower-carbon network operations. The deployment in the Western Cape represents an early commercial roll-out of the technology and signals a step toward scaling next-generation connectivity across Africa.
By consolidating hardware and improving power efficiency, the 5-band RRU could help operators accelerate network expansion and capacity upgrades, an important capability as the region adopts more advanced mobile services and pursues broader digital transformation.
