Huawei pledges $600m investment in 5G

Chinese infrastructure vendor Huawei has pledged to invest a minimum of $600m in research and innovation in 5G technologies by 2018. The firm predicts that the first 5G networks will be commercially deployed from 2020 and will deliver peak data rates of over 10Gbps – 100 times faster than today’s 4G networks.

The investment will cover research into technologies such as air-interface technology, the vendor said. Huawei began investing in 5G technologies in 2009 and demonstrated 5G base stations with capacity of up to 50Gbps at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona in 2011 and 2012.

The firm has also participated in the EU’s 5G research projects, added its expertise on establishing the 5G Innovation Centre in the UK and worked with over 20 universities worldwide on 5G technologies.

“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 increasingly faster and better connections,” said Eric Xu, rotating CEO of Huawei.

Xu added that there are several issues that must be resolved before 5G can become a reality. 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,” said Xu.

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