IMC 2017: Huawei making India 5G ready

NEW DELHI: On the sidelines of India’s first-ever global mobile, internet and technology event in India – India Mobile Congress 2017, Huawei reinforced its commitment to bring world-class innovations to India and helping the country become part of a globally unified 5G ecosystem.

A pioneer in 5G innovation, Huawei has been investing in 5G research since 2009, and will invest US$600 million in the research and innovation by 2018, paving way for the technology’s commercial roll out in 2020. Committed to the Indian market, Huawei says it is continually investing in market-specific partnerships, developing localized solutions and conducting trials to ensure that India joins the ranks of other developed global economies in 5G’s commercial roll out.

Paving way for 5G realization in India, Huawei, together with Bharti Airtel, recently announced the country’s first Massive MIMO technology implementation. An integral component in India’s roadmap to 5G deployment, the Massive MIMO solution can potentially increase spectrum efficiency by six to ten times, significantly decreasing networking costs while enhancing intensive coverage. More importantly, the solution will enhance the user experience seamlessly and act as a gateway to 5G in India.

Last month, Huawei officially released its 5G-oriented mobile bearer solution X-Haul, which is now available globally and here in India. This solution has four core values: providing flexible access capabilities that can match the scenario of any site; implementing agile network operations based on a cloud architecture; enabling new service innovation through end-to-end network slicing; and supporting smooth evolution from 4G bearer networks to 5G bearer networks. The solution is set to help operators in India build end-to-end 5G networks.

For backhaul scenarios in areas that have a high population density like Indian metros such as Delhi and Mumbai, Huawei launched the industry's first 50GE/100GE adaptive network slicing router, which provides seamless 100GE compatibility even when providing 50GE base station access. For scenarios where optical cables are not used, Huawei launched the industry's first 5G-ready microwave solution. Smooth capacity upgrade is supported through the use of a same frequency band or inter-frequency band Carrier Aggregation (CA) technology, which enables any-media 10GE to site. For fronthaul scenarios, Huawei launched the industry's first 100G Full-outdoor WDM device, which is deployed at the same site as the base station to save optical cable resources.

Speaking on the occasion, Jay Chen, CEO, Huawei India, said, “The 5G era is approaching, and we are confident that 5G deployment in India will happen in line with global timeline. We are continually developing technologies to effectively support operators' new service development and expand the business blueprint in upcoming 5G scenarios. Huawei continues to promote joint innovation with operators in the 5G field around the world and in India, and is joining hands with upstream and downstream industry partners to promote the sustainable development of the 5G industry.”

As Huawei continues to pioneer 5G worldwide, the ICT leader has announced a string of milestones which are advancing the development of the revolutionary technology and defining its commercial roadmap globally. Earlier this month, Deutsche Telekom (DT) in collaboration with Huawei announced Europe’s first 5G connection based on the latest 3GPP standard. On DT’s commercial network in central Berlin, the network has gone live with a 5G connection at over two gigabits per second and a low latency of three milliseconds over a 3.7 gigahertz spectrum link. Powered by Huawei user equipment using 3GPP specifications for 5G New Radio (NR), the deployment on commercial sites is the first in Europe.

Closer home, in the Sangam area of Seoul, a hotspot for digital and media businesses, LG U+ and Huawei recently successfully completed the first phase of their 5G intensive urban field test. This 5G field test was designed as commercial-oriented and realized by an end-to-end 5G network with 5G gNodeB, Ng Core and a 5G mobile bearer network. The test content covered coverage and capacity tests under the 5G target frequency band millimeter wave 28GHz.

In China, Huawei is spearheading the completion of the core network test for the country’s second-phase 5G R&D trial organized by the IMT-2020 (5G) Promotion Group. The test, recently conducted at the Beijing lab of China Academy of Information and Communications Technology (CAICT), covered service-oriented architecture, critical 5G service procedures, network slicing, mobile edge computing, and other key technologies.