Huawei plans to will invest a minimum of US$600 million in research and innovation for 5G technologies by 2018. The company predicts that the first 5G networks will be ready for commercial deployment starting in 2020 and will deliver peak data rates of over 10Gbps, 100 times faster than today’s 4G networks.
“There are several issues that must be resolved before 5G can become a reality,” said Mr 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. By 2020, it is estimated that 6.5 billion people worldwide will use mobile networks for data communications and 100 billion of additional ‘things’, such as vehicles, meters, medical devices, and home appliances, will also be connected to the network over 5G. We have already achieved many technological breakthroughs in 5G research and innovation, but the majority of the work remains ahead of us.”
Huawei noted that it began investing in 5G in 2009, and demonstrated the first prototypes at the Mobile World Congress in 2011 and 2012 with the capacity up to 50 Gbps.