Viewpoint
At the 2024 MWC held in Barcelona, Liu Kang, President of ICT Marketing & Solution Sales at Huawei, shared his insights into the new opportunities that 5G & BEYOND will bring, and how we can make the most of them
Liu Kang notes how each change in technology innovation has changed our economic development for the better. During the industrial revolution, it took about 100 years for the steam engine to deliver 30% additional growth to the world’s economy. This same economic growth pattern has taken just 20 years to reach in the digital economy era. With 5G, 5.5G and AI this is expected to take just 5 years!
The upgrade from 5G to 5.5G is estimated to increase network capabilities tenfold, with download speeds that will reach 10 Gbps and uplink speeds of 1Gbps, being able to support over 100 billion IoT (internet of things) connections. This sort of network upgrade will allow for a vast range of industry applications, such as The industry’s private line business will extend to private line + ICT services, industrial internet applications will expand from supporting production to core production, and IoT applications will grow from low-speed to encompassing low, medium, and high-speed full-scene services. These developments will create new business opportunities within the industry, says Liu Kang.
Furthermore, upgrading from 5G to 5.5G will allow the 50% of 5G operators who have already released FWA services, to upgrade to FWA Square, which will encompass the following scenarios:
FWA Pro. – aimed at high-end homes, enables the Gbps speed and end-to-end deterministic experience assurance.
FWA Lite. – aimed at oriented to low-end and mid-range requirements, further explores the user space, migrates existing 4G users
FWA Biz – aimed at enterprise use cases, which will utilise low-latency & high-reliability to benefit SMEs.
Liu Kang continues that with speeds of 50 Mbps guaranteed, 5G private lines have been widely used for fast and low-cost deployment. But with 5.5G, these speeds are set to increase to 300 Mbps (guaranteed) and 20ms latency with over 99.999% reliability, which could bring an incredible amount of possibilities for the industry, including significant advancements in telemedicine.
In industry, 5G is used already in many areas, such as mining, where more than 20 operators provide 5G services for more than 400 mines. With 5.5G, these situations can be upgraded with 5.5G smart mine solutions, streamlining the industry, making it safer, and increasing efficiency and profits.
Finally, Liu Kang notes that in 2023, there were 350 million connected vehicles on the road worldwide, with 45% of new vehicles sold reaching s L2+ intelligent level. Here, the smart collaboration of vehicles is paramount for driver safety, “necessitating a highly reliable network with a low latency of 20ms@99%. 5.5G can satisfy this network requirement, E2E technology has been verified in Shanghai, projected to improve traffic efficiency by 30% and reduce people’s commute time by 20%,” says Liu Kang.
In his closing remarks, Liu Kang noted that the development of industry is dependent on the collaboration of business with technology, “Only in this way can a virtuous circle of input and output be formed.”