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Huawei plans $600m investment in 10Gbps 5G network

Chinese telecoms firm predicts that the next-next-gen mobile network be commercially available from 2020

Jochan Embley
Wednesday 06 November 2013 12:04 GMT
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A 4G mobile hotspot device built by Huawei
A 4G mobile hotspot device built by Huawei

Chinese megafirm Huawei is set to invest a minimum of $600m (£370m) in research into 5G network technology by 2018, it has been announced.

Huawei, who recently claimed the third biggest global smartphone market share behind Samsung and Apple, also said that it predicts to begin a commercial rollout of 5G by 2020.

4G, the current generation of mobile networking, is currently being implemented by some mobile operators in the UK, with the rollout set to continue for the rest of 2013. Huawei recently piloted its own superfast 4G service in London with speeds of up to 300Mpbs.

However, Huawei is not resting on its laurels and are already setting to work on 4G’s successor: the still largely embryonic 5G network.

In a statement on Huawei’s website, the firm explained that the multi-million dollar investment would be used to develop a number of enabling technologies for 5G.

It was also claimed in the statement that the speed of Huawei’s 5G will peak above 10Gps, over 100 times faster than the speeds offered by today’s 4G service providers.

Writing on the website, Eric Xu, the current CEO of Huawei (they rotate every six months) said: “There are several issues that must be resolved before 5G can become a reality, 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.”

“We have already achieved many technological breakthroughs in 5G research and innovation, but the majority of the work remains ahead of us.”

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