Huawei develops 5.5G network 10 times faster than 5G

At the recent Global Mobile Broadband Forum (MBBF 2023) in Dubai, Huawei and telecom company EITC introduced a model villa equipped with 5.5G connectivity technology (also known as 5G-A), the first in the world .

The villa simulates a seamless and integrated living space with glasses-free 3D and extended reality (XR) technologies, supporting 10 Gbps network speeds.

5G technology began commercial deployment four years ago, ushering in an era of hyperconnectivity, powering IoT networks and enabling new productivity models.

Mr. Li Peng, Senior Vice President and President of Huawei Mobile Networks Business Group.

There are currently more than 50,000 industrial 5G applications worldwide and more than 10 million 5G connections in industrial environments. In China alone, 5G is being used in many areas such as manufacturing, mining, power grids, ports, steel, and even healthcare. However, in many other countries, 5G is still in the testing phase.

Meanwhile, Huawei believes that what 5G brings is not enough to build a fully connected and intelligent world. The reason is that 5G in ideal conditions can achieve a maximum download speed of 10 Gbps, but in reality, it only achieves 800 Mbps to 1 Gbps.

As a result, in June 2022, an alliance of Huawei, China Mobile, and several Chinese companies announced the 5G-A enhanced network. 5G-A was approved by 3GPP - a global communications standards-setting organization representing about 700 companies including Apple, Google, and Huawei.

In terms of speed, 5.5G is superior to 5G with download speeds of 10 Gbps and upload speeds of 1 Gbps, supporting new services such as XR and glasses-free 3D. With access speeds 10 times faster and stability higher than 5G, 5.5G will bring more benefits to the economy and many areas of life.

In the IoT field, 5.5G supports 100 billion connections, 10 times more than current 5G. In terms of experience, the new technology shortens latency from 20 ms of early 5G to 1 ms, supporting positioning at the centimeter level instead of the meter level.

"Technology is changing rapidly and users' demands for new experiences are constantly increasing. Therefore, network connectivity also needs to innovate and develop continuously. That is why we and our partners are developing 5.5G to achieve this goal," said Ken Hu, Huawei's rotating chairman, at the MBBF 2023 event.

Meanwhile, Mr. Li Peng, Vice President of Huawei, said that 5.5G will open up the future of glasses-free 3D, autonomous vehicles, new generation production lines, connecting more IoT devices and the prospect of intelligent computing everywhere.

"By 2025, there will be more than 500 million smart vehicles on the road. With high-bandwidth and low-latency networks, vehicles can share information with each other, people, roads, and the cloud in real time," he said. "In the driving assistance scenario, smart cars will consume more than 300 gigabytes of data per month to create cloud-based models and update algorithms weekly," Li Peng shared.

Huawei representatives and tourists cut the ribbon to inaugurate the world's first 5.5G Villa.

Previously, at the Mobile World Congress Shanghai 2023 in June, Ms. Meng Wanzhou, Huawei's CFO, commented: "5.5G not only brings better connectivity, but also creates new business opportunities, meeting the goals for many needs in the fields of IoT, sensors and modern manufacturing."

In the first half of 2023, several countries in the Middle East began deploying 5.5G open labs. On September 11, Huawei said it had completed all functional testing of 5.5G.

10 Gbps speed meets the requirements of immersive interactive services such as AI training data cloudification, cloud conferencing, service applications requiring large bandwidth in industrial manufacturing, remote control, multimedia real-time interactive services such as XR, which require high speed, low latency and high reliability.

Huawei is currently leading the way in 5G. In addition to upgrading 5G and 5.5G, the company plans to deploy 6G networks from 2030. This network is expected to excel in metrics such as latency, traffic density, connection density, mobility, and spectrum efficiency.

China has also considered building a 6G network and established the National 6G Research and Development Promotion Group since 2019. According to expectations, 6G is estimated to reach a speed of 1 TB/s, 100 times faster than 5G and can download more than 142 hours of Netflix content at the highest resolution in one second.

Ha Cuong

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