5G and LTE need to learn to share - Huawei

Huawei reckons the early success of 5G lays with successfully interoperating new radio infrastructure with existing LTE.

Running live demos at its Mobile Broadband Forum (MBBF) in Japan this week, Huawei said it was able to run a 5G/LTE dual connectivity trial leaning on a cloud-based RAN system, achieving peak single-user speeds of a frankly ridiculous 21.1 Gbps

Extending the principle into the real-world, Huawei reckons early deployments of 5G into central hotspots in major urban areas will be well met by the continuing evolution of LTE which, given what the acronym stands for, kind of makes sense. Things like 3D Massive MIMO and continuing degrees of Carrier Aggregation are really pushing today’s possibilities with LTE.

It is now such a broadly deployed technology that the vast majority of mature telecoms markets will be able to feasibly use it as a base for 5G to build upon in densely populated urban areas. With that in mind, Huawei says the optimal conditions for early 5G using what it calls ‘new radio’ will be in connectivity hotspots, Central London for instance. The overwhelming capacity and latency potential of 5G can begin by serving the most densely covered and populated areas, supplemented with LTE, before slowly expanding outwards.

“It is of vital importance to guarantee end users with a ubiquitous high data rate experience in densely populated urban city areas with high buildings and complex roadways,” said Yuefeng Zhou, CMO of Huawei’s wireless networks product line. “Recently, 3GPP standardization has made significant progress in 5G and LTE Dual Connectivity. We expect to strengthen our cooperation with industry partners on 5G innovations based on these real application scenarios.”

Meanwhile, the Chinese kit vendor has been working developing a network slicing proposition alongside China Telecom. Network slicing essentially means creating scalable and agile network instances solely responsible for providing the required network resources for a specific function, task or service. Done so virtually, the practise is intended to increase the dynamism of next gen networks so that resources aren’t being needlessly sapped up.

Jeff Wang, President of Huawei’s access networks product line summed up the supposed benefits pretty neatly.

“With this function, multiple services can be independently carried, operated, maintained, and managed on one network, helping operators improve device utilization, lower the O&M cost, and achieve business successes.”