Even before 5G, Massive MIMO is being harnessed as a technology to boost the performance of LTE. Chinese vendors and operators have been in the vanguard of this trend, and last week saw China Mobile and Huawei aiming to break the gigabit barrier for cell throughput. The companies announced the completion of the second phase of their Massive MIMO research, a project with the objective of 1.09Gbps throughput using LTE-Advanced Pro (or 4.5G Evolution as some vendors now call it). The test involved spatial multiplexing of Massive MIMO, used on commercial devices. Huawei says commercial Massive MIMO systems currently reach 720Mbps cell throughput in 20 MHz of spectrum, which is 6-7 times more spectrally efficient than a traditional base station.…