Huawei looks ahead at MWC 2015 with 5G, green and cloud announcements

Consumer electronics and wearable tech aside, Chinese giant Huawei whipped up a relative storm in the networking world at Mobile World Congress this week by unveiling an array of new mobile broadband and networking services in Barcelona. At the centre of Huawei’s new offerings were 5G and cloud services designed to help operators better manage the explosion of big data.

By utilising network virtualization, Huawei reckons maximising network energy efficiency and building greener mobile broadband technology will become increasingly integral to the future of the ICT industry. Its “green” strategy focuses on energy consumption optimisation and energy utilisation of legacy networking equipment, and designing management software that assists in the management of network equipment energy usage.

Meanwhile, the rotating CEO of Huawei, Ken Hu, delivered a keynote speech at MWC which focussed on the arrival of a 5G world. During his talk, Hu discussed the barriers and challenges which need to be overcome in order to enable 5G, including cross-industry collaboration, technological innovation and an evolution in commercial strategies. He claimed the primary reasons driving the demand for 5G include IoT, consumer experience demand and the evolving needs of enterprise verticals.

“Fully deployed 5G networks will have the capability to reach over 100 billion smart nodes,” he said. “This capability is extremely valuable for many applications. More than just an upgrade, 5G will become a powerful platform that enables new applications, new business models, and even new industries – as well as many disruptions.”

In his keynote session, Hu claimed that 5G will have a peak download speed of 10 Gbps, saying that the download of an 8GB high definition movie will be almost instantaneous. He said that, historically speaking, a 3G connection would download the movie in more than an hour and in seven minutes on 4G, but it would take as little as six seconds on 5G.

Back at the Huawei stand, the firm announced its strategic collaboration partnership with Intel this week, to deliver public cloud solutions for telecoms carriers; a concerted network virtualization effort. The two technology incumbents, according to a Huawei statement, plan to concentrate efforts on developing scalable, optimised and cost-efficient hardware and software platforms for cloud deployment models across server, storage, network and infrastructure management technologies.

Speaking on industry collaboration, Jason Waxman, VP for Cloud Platforms Group at Intel, said: “Industry collaboration will foster innovation to deliver the latest cloud technology to Telecommunications Service Providers. Huawei’s efforts with Intel to develop the next generation FusionSphere products using Intel technology will enable service providers to deliver high performing, secure, and agile cloud services.”

Alongside stating its 5G ambitions, and announcing collaborative methods and new product suites, Huawei also discussed the work it’s doing in accelerating digital services platform transformation with its “Digital inCloud” service, which is designed to assist the delivery of digital content, including music, gaming, video, APIs, traffic monetisation and IoT/M2M.