Huawei prepares for “one click” 5G

Huawei today revealed more about its "road to 5G" strategy as the global telecommunications community gears up for the next generation of mobile broadband.

Speaking at the company's annual Global Mobile Broadband Forum in Tokyo, Ryan Ding, president of products and solutions, said Huawei wanted to be able to deliver 5G with "one click" on the first day of its commercial launch, which is broadly expected to be in 2020.

Hu explained: "2G, 3G and 4G is mainly human centric, but from 5G it's human and things' centric. For humans we will continue to invest and make sure we can continue to provide the best experience for voice, for data, for video, for gaming and something [that] perhaps will happen in the future."

"[What] will become more and more important is things'. The 'things' experience is totally different to human beings. After several years hard working, we believe we [can] evaluate or manage the things' experience in five dimensions availability, bandwidth, coverage, delay sensitivity and energy saving," he said.

Hu gave the example of smart water meters that Huawei is developing with China Mobile and a water company in Shenzhen. For these, coverage and energy efficiency are the most important dimensions, whereas for in-car infotainment, bandwidth is the most important. Remote control smart parking in a connected car, however, would prioritise coverage over everything else.

"For 'things' experience we believe we should not wait until 2020, we already can start to do something we already can do a lot of work to make sure of the readiness of our network. This should be end-to-end, not just base stations," Hu said.

In his remarks, Hu echoed Fotus Karonis, managing director of IT and mobile at BT Group and CTIO at EE.

"5G evolution, of course, isn't just about [how much you have] but what you can do with that," Karonis said. "We're not trying to get more technology from it only, but [a] wide range of applications. We should not only focus on the [technology], but on the end service what are we trying to achieve?"

Arnaud Vamparys, SVP of radio networks at Orange, sounded a similar note, saying 5G isn't "just mobile broadband" but will allow Orange and others to offer many different services over a single network.

"There's a lot of challenges to be [overcome] before 5G arrival," said Vamparys, citing infrastructure and energy consumption as particular hurdles. However there are new opportunities as well, notably in IoT.

Now in its seventh year, Huawei Global Mobile Broadband forum takes place over 24 and 25 November 2016. Features editor and networking correspondent Jane McCallion is on site for the entire event click here keep up to date with all the latest news, including 5G, IoT and AI,and follow Jane on Twitter.

Main image credit: Jane McCallion, IT Pro