April 20, 2010 - Blue Wonder Communications – the independent design house and licensor of LTE-IP and system solutions – has entered into the interoperability testing phase with its recently announced LTE IP product BWC200. During this test session against ZTE's test environment the BWC200 has successfully passed uplink, downlink and synchronization tests via antenna over the air at up to 20 MHz bandwidth.

"Blue Wonder stands for leading-edge LTE IP with highest quality. The interoperability testing is an important step to prove the maturity of our IP products", states Dr. Wolfram Drescher, Managing Director at Blue Wonder Communications. "We are delighted to have ZTE as a well equipped and experienced partner to support us during this testing phase."

Interoperability testing (IOT) is a measure to prove the ability of communication systems to operate in a real environment seamlessly and interference-free together with other systems. For LTE solutions it consists mainly of 3GPP standard conformance tests and of tests against LTE base stations – also called eNode B's. In ZTE Lab, commercial eNode B equipment consists of ZXSDR 800MHz band RRU and multi-mode BBU which are involved into the IOT. ZTE LTE eNode B is sharing the common radio hardware platform. This common hardware resource pool has most attractive features like the SDR (software defined radio) and baseband. The product design target is reconfiguring to different Radio Access Technology only by software and without change to the hardware. The focus of the recent BWC200 test session was on FDD mode (frequency division duplexing). Blue Wonder's BWC200 LTE IP product is a TDD/FDD multimode solution, up to category 4. It's been prevalidated on the Blue Wonder development platform BlueGate that is capable of running in common frequency bands in the range of 700 MHz to 2700 MHz in both TDD and FDD modes (e.g. band 5, band 20, band 38). BWC200 represents a complete LTE subsystem that can easily be integrated in System-on-Chip (SoC) platforms. It is available for licensees now. The IOT was successfully passed and indicates the opening of the 800MHz band LTE era.

"Blue Wonder is the first company to test equipment against ZTE' LTE technology since we opened the new test lab in Düsseldorf' s test and innovation center in March 2010" explains Michael Stückmann, COO of the ZTE Vodafone Business Unit. "The fact that we are conducting tests with LTE IP products in Germany shows that we are strengthening our R&D capacities in the European Market and that we are ready to help the operators with the rollout of 4G technology. All our customers will profit from the interoperability tests we are doing in our test lab", underlines Michael Stückmann.