Huawei unveils raft of mobile networking plans at MWC 2016

Networking equipment maker Huawei used Mobile World Congress to showcase a variety of new bandwidth boosting partnerships and technologies.

The Huawei theme for MWC 2016 is Open ROADS to a Better Connected World, with ROADS standing for Real-time, On-demand, All-online, DIY and Social.

Huawei unveiled how it helped Middle East based Omantel to create a Smart Pole system of 4G small cells in Muscat’s city centre in Oman. Huawei showcased this as a demo of how to shorten 4G network deployment to meet booming mobile broadband traffic demand. In the Oman network base stations are deployed on walls and 10-15-meter tall poles which contain both small cell and wifi technology and can cover up to 300 meters.

Another demo showed how Huawei and South Korean operator LG U+ have completed trials of the telco’s 4T4R network, a self-proclaimed 4.5G network, which is to be commercially launched in March. A specialist in mobile video services, LG U+ has 7 million high definition video subscribers and monthly traffic of 4.8 GB per user. Huawei claims its small cell now serves 400 global networks.

Huawei also chaired a global narrow band IoT (NB-IoT) summit with 300 mobile and vertical representatives. However, Yu Quan, Chief Strategy Officer of Wireless Product Line of Huawei, said that although only 10% of overall IoT is working on cellular networks, this technology is being unexploited as it has massive coverage and price advantages.

Another Huawei partnership showcased, with telco China Mobile, exemplified how their new jointly created 4.5G (TDD+) core technologies, using the multiple antenna techniques of Massive MIMO and DMIMO, can improve network capacity and user experience. The two began working together in 2014 with the joint launch of the Huawei and China Mobile Massive MIMO service. The Massive MIMO offering, which now features a 128T128R antenna system with a downlink throughput of 650 Mbit/s and a bandwidth of 20 MHz per carrier, represents a huge improvement in spectral efficiency and overcomes obstacles in site location acquisition, Huawei claimed.

Finally Huawei claims to have broken records with a live demo of 4K broadcasting that achieved 40Mbps over 1,600 kilometers. Huawei achieved this with the introduction of high throughput routers (HTRs) to the bearer network, which boosts network throughput and the user’s 4K video experience, according to Peng Wei, president of Huawei’s Fixed Network Marketing.