Regarding the 5G AAU equipment, ZTE recommends using 64T64R AAU in dense urban areas to achieve the highest performance, and 16T16R AAU in urban and suburban areas to make a good balance between coverage and network construction costs.
The 64T64R AAU consists of a large number of independent transceiver channels, which can support accurate horizontal and vertical beamforming at the same time, thus achieving ideal capacity gains with space-division multiplexing in densely populated areas.
In addition, 64T64R AAU has strong beam reflection, diffraction, and anti-interference capability. Even in dense urban areas with complex wireless environments, 3.5G NR can achieve the same coverage as existing 1.8 GHz 2T2R LTE with co-site deployment mode, thus reducing the difficulty and cost of 5G network deployment.
For the general urban and suburban scenarios with a small number of data users, low traffic density, a very low pairing probability of MU-MIMO, 16T16R AAU is recommended, because it has a higher cost-performance ratio, and also enables 3.5G NR to have the same coverage as 1.8G LTE even with co-site deployment mode.
For more details about ZTE 5G AAU
Source: ZTE