Huawei’s wireless President Ying Weimin has said the vendor has achieved trial 5G speeds of more than 70 Gbps.

Cloud architectures, new air interfaces and intelligent operations are the three pillars of creating 5G-ready networks, according to Weimin, who was speaking at 5G World in London. He said the Chinese vendor is looking at the three aforementioned facets of technology in order to create a business-driven network enabled by a cloud-native architecture. Therein, Huawei is looking at network slicing technology to enable emBB (ultra-broadband), uRLLC (latency sensitive) and mMTC (massive devices).

“CloudRAN architectures are a very important function for delivering 5G and IoT,” said Weimin. “One terminal can integrate the stream from IoT, 5G and wifi together. So suddenly the mobile cloud is used as a service anchor, and we have a plan to implement CloudRAN in the LTE era to be fully ready for the 5G era. We also need a unified air interface, using elements like Massive MIMO and Full Duplex to boost the capacity of the network.”

He then went on to explain the need for spectrum efficiency-maximising technologies, and how machine intelligence will be able to conduct the foundational tasks required for 5G, freeing up humans for more important tasks.

“But for high frequency bands coverage will always be a massive challenge, so we need to be able to boost coverage and spectrum efficiency as a very high priority for the FDD and TDD spectrum,” he said. “When thinking of radio networks and these challenges we also need to focus on ensuring high performance, and focus heavily on service management and deep intelligence. In the 5G era a lot of the tasks currently taken up by humans can be done by machines, allowing people to focus instead on service creation or business development.”

Huawei also said it has completed the world’s first large scale sub-6 GHz field trial in partnership with NTT DoCoMo, in which it successfully achieved 3.6 Gbps. Weimin pointed to many other lab trials Huawei has been conducting in the past year, which have delivered some eye-watering peak speeds – although it is worth considering that lab trial results under ideal conditions almost inevitably cannot be realised again in the field or real-world. Nonetheless, a peak speed in lab trials of over 70 Gbps is one almighty feat.