MWC Shanghai: Huawei CEO urges telecom regulators to release 5G spectrum

Ken Hu, rotating CEO of Huawei, today urged telecom regulators globally to keep aside enough spectrum for the forthcoming 5G technologies.

Speaking at the Mobile World Congress 2015 in Shanghai on Thursday, the Huawei CEO said telecom operators need at least 100 MHz spectrum to roll out 5G services. 5G is expected to be commercially available by 2020.

3G services required 5 MHz, while 4G was launched with 20 Mhz.

The rotating CEO of Huawei demanded the following:

# establish collaboration across vertical industries

# set up industry specific 5G demo networks

# spectrum for 5G networks

5G network

Sangchul Lee, CEO of LG UPlus, said: “5G should support massive connectivity, intelligence and processing complexity.”

He said video will replace voice. Video will be the next voice for the global telecom industry. 5G will not replace 4G.

Bill Morrow, CEO of NBN, Australia, in his presentation said the company’s fixed wireless is making a difference to customers in the country. “Our LTE network is already creating growth in regional areas.”

He said 5G will offer better capacity enabling substantially higher data usage in NBN’s fixed wireless network. The 5G network will ensure lower latency delivering better QoS on critical applications. 5G will also deliver faster speed bringing fixed wireless more in line with fixed broadband technologies. The arrival of 5G and IoT will bring new opportunities for end users.

Incidentally, telecom operators will have a huge task to handle spectrum prices being fixed by governments. Most operators have already spent huge funds for both 3G and 4G networks.

Rajeev Suri, president and CEO of Nokia, said the telecom network vendor has become a specialist in the mobile broadband space. “The strategy has worked well for us. We are scaling up with the recent acquisition of (Alcatel-Lucent). We will further grow in North America.”

The global telecom industry needs advanced technologies like 5G to ensure better connectivity. “The world will have 50 billion connected devices. 5G will change several industry verticals. In the water distribution space, you can use big data and ensure better usage of water,” Suri said.

5G challenges:

# standardization
# security and privacy
# industry collaboration

Recently, Huawei said Europe reached a major milestone on the road towards 5G with the launch of the first phase projects of the European 5G Public Private Partnership (5GPPP) on July 1 2015. Huawei is working on five of the 19 EU co-funded projects.

The 5GPPP initiative is expected to leverage a total of €3.5 billion in private investment, boosted by €700 million in EU funding.

5G is expected to provide 1000 times higher wireless area capacity, saving up to 90 percent of energy per service provided, and creating a secure, reliable and dependable internet with “zero perceived” downtime.

“5G is the standard that will take us into the era of ‘smart everything’. This will create vast business opportunities while enhancing quality of life on a number of levels. Building fruitful alliances will be key to bringing us closer to transforming our vision of 5G into a global standard. Europe has huge potential for boosting 5G development by federating efforts, and the 5GPPP is a good illustration of this approach,” said Wen Tong, Huawei Wireless CTO.

Nokia CEO said 5G will be a strong enabler for Internet of Things (IoT) as compared with 4G.

Baburajan K
[email protected]