Huawei outlined its vision of a 4.5G “business blueprint” for mobile operators that it sees as an intermediate step for LTE on the road to 5G.
In a briefing held a week before Mobile World Congress, Huawei said 4.5G will help stimulate the increasing popularity of many technologies such as mobile virtual reality glasses, smart metering and drones. Some observations from Huawei:
- 4.5G can deliver up to 1Gbps bandwidth on mobile networks, making mobile virtual reality possible and this immersive experience available everywhere. Virtual reality glasses provide an immersive HD experience, but the bandwidth requirement can be as high as 1Gbps, 4.5G will be capable of meeting this requirement.
- 4.5G will make cellular IoT a reality. Industry applications such as smart metering require low-power terminals and better network coverage. While LTE is mainly designed to handle smart phone capacity, which is unable to reach a large scale, 4.5G supports up to 100K per cell connections via LTE-M, 100 times that of 4G. LTE-M also provides better coverage (Receivers require just 1/100th of the signal of existing 2G system, 20dB Gain) using low-power terminals (10 year battery life).
- Industry 4.0 requires lower latency between command and execution. For example, the precision control of a drone requires at least a 20ms end-to-end latency. 4.5G as a key component of Industry 4.0 provides the capability of less than 10ms end-to-end latency, opening the door for large scale commercialization of real-time mobile applications.
“4.5G is a natural evolution of LTE, and supports new business opportunities and an improved user experience through enhancement of the mobile network‘s capacity and capability. This in turn will transition our industry into an all online world with ultra high speed massive connections and low latency, allowing all of us to be fully prepared for the large-scale arrival of applications for cellular IoT,” stated Bob Cai, Vice President of Marketing, Huawei Wireless Network Product Line.
http://pr.huawei.com/en/news/hw-415269-4.5g.htm#.VO1dovm-2-0
