Huawei is to launch a range of services – including the research of air-interface technology – and the company predicts its 5G rollout will be ready for commercial deployment in 2020. The company expects to deliver peak data rates of over 10Gbps, 100 times faster than 4G networks.
“Innovation is continuous journey,” said Eric Xu, rotating CEO at Huawei. “While we continue to evolve our existing 4G network capabilities, we plan to invest a minimum of $600 million over the next five years on research and innovation for 5G mobile network technologies, to ensure that we are meeting the consumers’ demands for faster and better connections.”
The company claims it began investing in 5G in 2009, and it has demonstrated industry-leading 5G prototype base stations with capacities of up to 50Gbps during the last two years. It has also been working with a range of partners on the developments, and the company has participated in the EU’s 5G research project.
Huawei has also worked on the establishment of a 5G innovation centre in the UK, with the company stating it will serve as an active contributor in building 5G standards and ecosystems to drive globally consistent standards across the industry.
“There are several issues that must be resolved before 5G can become a reality,” said Xu.
“These include the availability of spectrum and technological challenges, such as how to engineer network architectures capable of handling increasingly higher data volumes and transmission speeds necessary to accommodate more users on the network.”
