Huawei is moving ahead into the 5.5G era, a marked advance over current 5G networks and a practical halfway house on the road to 6G. Also known as 5G-Advanced, 5.5G promises big improvements in factory automation, autonomous driving and various other applications.
At the company’s 14th Global Mobile Broadband Forum held on October 10-11 in Dubai, Huawei’s President of Wireless Solution Cao Ming announced “the industry’s first full-series solutions for 5.5G,” which he said “will help operators deliver full-scenario tenfold capabilities and enable ultra-high energy efficiency, spectrum utilization, and O&M [operations & maintenance] efficiency.”
Huawei has been working on 5.5G with network operators China Mobile, China Telecom, China Unicom, Saudi Telecommunications Company and the UAE’s du. At the forum, Huawei and du showed participants their 5G-Advanced demonstration smart home.
Technology market research organization Counterpoint explains that “Compared to conventional 5G, 5.5G represents a tenfold improvement in performance across the board. This means that 5.5G networks will be able to provide ubiquitous 10 Gbps downlink and 1 Gbps uplink speeds while supporting 100 billion IoT connections – compared to just 10 billion with 5G.
“In addition, 5.5G is expected to deliver latency and positioning accuracy that are a fraction of the current 5G standard as well as significant reductions in overall network power consumption.”
Huawei’s main network competitors, Nokia and Ericsson, are also working on 5.5G. Ericsson says, “Get ready for more sustainable and intelligent mobile networks and enhanced support for services and applications such as the metaverse, industry wireless sensors, and accurate positioning virtual reality.”
According to Nokia, “5G-Advanced is set to evolve 5G to its fullest, richest capabilities. It will create a foundation for more demanding applications and a wider range of use cases… with a truly immersive user experience based on extended reality (XR) features.” It will also be backward compatible, Nokia says.
By facilitating the use of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning across networks, Nokia expects 5G-Advanced to enhance the performance of industrial automation and autonomous robots, logistics, autonomous vehicles and drones, and power grid control.
It will also support massive low-cost IoT (Internet of Things) networks and public services such as railway systems and smart city management.
Huawei first proposed 5.5G/5G-Advanced at its 11th Global Mobile Broadband Forum in 2020. It was designated as the second phase of 5G by 3GPP (the 3rd Generation Partnership Project), an international association of seven telecommunications standard development organizations, in 2021.
In July 2022, Huawei executive director David Wang introduced the company’s 5G-Advanced innovation roadmap, noting that “AI will be fully integrated into enterprise production processes, and the size of the 5.5G IoT market will grow rapidly.
“Collaboration between robots and people in complex scenarios will impose greater requirements on next-generation industrial field networks.”
At the Mobile World Congress held in Barcelona, Spain, from February 27 to March 2, 2023. Huawei stated that “5.5G will expand on 5G, but will be faster, more automated and more intelligent than 5G, and support more frequency bands.
“5.5G will deliver 10 times greater network capabilities, which will translate into 100 times more opportunities. Free-viewpoint video, enterprise cloudification, mobile private networks, passive IoT, and integrated sensing and communication will all develop rapidly thanks to these advances in 5G.”
Four months later, during the Mobile World Congress Shanghai at the end of June 2023, Huawei announced plans to launch a complete set of commercial 5.5G network equipment in 2024.
Despite being progressively excluded from the US and its allies in Europe and Asia, Huawei is securely positioned as the leading telecom equipment provider in China, which is both the world’s largest industrial economy and well ahead in 5G deployment.
By the end of September 2023, China had built 3.2 million 5G base stations and had nearly 740 million 5G users accounting for half the world total, according to the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT).
More than 20,000 5G-enabled industry virtual private networks had been established by the end of last month. China’s 14th Five-Year Plan calls for more than 10,000 5G-enabled factories to be built by the end of 2025.
Nokia and Ericsson will not be allowed to compete for much of China’s market. With time, they can be expected to regain their former dominance in Europe as the EU and UK apply “rip and replace” policies to Chinese telecom equipment, but European economies and investment are currently weak.
Ericsson has its own 5G smart factory in the US, but the country is lagging behind Europe in industrial 5G deployment. The Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington, DC, notes:
“The United States faces a large and growing gap with China in radio frequency spectrum allocated for 5G wireless communications, particularly mid-band spectrum bands licensed for wide-area coverage, which constitute the primary arteries of the 5G economy and the broader global ecosystem of wireless connectivity.
“The United States needs to move urgently to allocate more mid-band spectrum for licensed commercial 5G use. If it does not do so, the US spectrum shortage will hinder technological innovation and give China an open path to global leadership in the connected future of the twenty-first century, threatening the economic and national security of the United States.”
Optimists in the US say that sanctions on China’s semiconductor industry will stymie the advance of Chinese telecommunications technology, but there is no evidence this is happening so far.
According to the MIIT, China has already established a nearly complete supply chain for 5G networks, has more than 40% of the world’s 5G-related patents and has completed all 5.5G/5G-Advanced technical performance tests. Huawei itself has already built its first 5G-Advanced industrial production line.
As reported by China’s Communist Party-run Global Times, MIIT will continue to accelerate 5G applications in fields such as manufacturing, mining, electric power and port management, and explore new applications in healthcare, education and other sectors. 5G has been extended to 67 of the 97 major Chinese economic categories, MIIT says.
With time, these applications will be upgraded to 5.5G, which Huawei will also deliver to the Middle East and other places resistant to US pressure.
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