Huawei to spend $600million on 5G research, innovation

HUAWEI Technologies has disclosed that it would be investing $600million on 5G research and innovation in 2018.

This is coming as the company, alongside Deutsche Telekom, and Intel, achieved the world’s first 5G interoperability and development testing (IODT) as part of efforts to accelerate the 5G ecosystem.

The 5G NR interoperability test is based on Huawei’s 5G commercial base station and Intel’s third generation 5G NR Mobile Trial Platform (MTP). It is a critical step towards the early development of full commercial 5G equipment in 2019, accelerating the 5G ecosystem.

Announcing this development on Monday at the ongoing Mobile World Congress, in Barcelona, Spain, Huawei said the test configuration used by the three parties is based on the largest C-band cell bandwidth defined by the 5G NR standard. It also incorporates the latest Massive MIMO multi-antenna and beam forming technology enabled by the standard framework.

This is based on the 3GPP R15 standard with a commercial base station in an operator lab environment upon the successful test in Bonn, Germany after the trio initially verified the first 5G NR interoperability in Huawei’s Shanghai labs.

Speaking on the achievement, Senior Vice President Technology Innovation, Deutsche Telekom, Arash Ashouriha, said: “The successful testing in our 5G hauls operator environment is another significant step on the path to 5G ecosystem maturities and early 5G commercialisation.”

For President, Huawei 5G product line, Yang Chaobin, the standard will continually be updated, adding that Huawei will continue to work with all parties to step up additional interoperability tests, promote the 5G industry maturity process, and welcome the arrival of the entire industry digitisation.”

According to him, Huawei had been innovating and investing in 5G for years; Huawei will spend a minimum of $600million on 5G research and innovation by 2018.