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Huawei is on the cutting edge of 5.5G — known as 5G-Advanced — an evolution of 5G that will connect people, things, vehicles and whole industries like never before.Thanks to 10 gigabit bandwidth, with latency of just milliseconds, massive scaling capacity and native intelligence, 5G-Advanced is poised to create business value by enabling entirely new use cases.
Uplink Centric Broadband Communication (UCBC) allows huge amounts of data to be migrated to the cloud, which will democratize live streaming services and enable higher levels of autonomy for intelligent, connected vehicles.
Real-Time Broadband Communication (RTBC) will bring an unprecedented level of interaction between people and the virtual world, delivering a truly immersive experience in real time.
Harmonized Communication and Sensing (HCS) makes operations more efficient in a diverse array of applications such as vehicle-to-road collaboration and high-speed rail perimeter sensing.
Watch the video below to learn more about how Huawei achieved the feat of bringing to market very high speed, yet extremely low latency mobile networks for a superb user experience that will prepare customers for a future of unlimited possibilities.
Huawei: Our vision for 5.5G is to connect people, connect vehicles, connect things, and connect homes and industries.
Innovation is something which goes beyond what was already known and used by mankind in certain fields of technology. The higher the technology you wish to improve, the more parallel developments you need, the more players you need in the world who work on all this. Because not one person alone, not one company alone can do this. The more patents a company files, the more offers to mankind it makes to share.
Q: Okay, so tell me a little bit about yourself.
Tang Zhenfei: My name is Tang Zen. I graduated from Beijing University of Post and Telecommunications. I joined Huawei in 2005, and I've worked here for 18 years. I now work on 5.5G standards research. My first impression of Huawei could be summed up in two words: strong and humble.
Q: So being at Huawei for 18 years, you must have worked on 3G, 4G, 5G, and now 5.5G. Can you tell me a little bit about what the evolution has been, what things have changed through those different timeframes of those different protocols?
Tang Zhenfei: Well, 2G and 3G were mainly used to make phone calls. They were for voice communication. When 4G arrived, that was the start of mobile internet. That's when online shopping took off. When the 5G era began, mobile video streaming flourished. 5G allows us to watch all kinds of videos with 5.5G, videos will be enhanced in two ways.
First, they'll be more immersive. Every video will deliver an avatar-esque experience. Second, they'll be more interactive. Now, there are many highly interactive cloud games. When you watch a video, a tiny FPS drop won't bother you much. But when you are playing a video game, that would not be okay – definitely not okay.
Q: So recently I visited a coal mine in Shanxi where Huawei had done a project leveraging their various technologies and they'd actually transformed some jobs from underground. They feel that they won't need 90% of the people that previously worked underground won't have to. They can be in much cleaner, safer environments. Do you see this kind of technology being able to be used to make that happen in many other industries?
Tang Zhenfei: I do. A key use case for 5.5G is connecting industries. As you mentioned, coal mining is an industry with high safety risks. 5.5G, low latency and large bandwidth can make the mining process more automated, reducing human involvement. Workers can now operate equipment remotely from the comfort of their offices and leave the rest to machines. 5.5G brings many innovative solutions to industries. It supports industry applications that require ultra-low latency and ultra-high reliability.
In industrial settings, 5.5G is enabling intelligent manufacturing. Vehicle connectivity is another major use case for 5.5G. Nowadays, more and more makers offer the assisted driving function. 5.5G networks can provide more sensing data for vehicles making assisted driving more efficient and creating better driving experiences.
Q: Okay, and tell me about some of the high points, the most exciting points during the development.
Tang Zhenfei: One high point was when the entire industry reached a consensus on 5.5G. The International Standardization Organization, 3GPP approved the term 5G-Aadvanced and a new logo for 5.5G. That was April 27th, 2021. Everybody was excited.
Q: Okay. Now going back to development, can you share any sort of experience or experiences about when there was very difficult things to overcome?
Tang Zhenfei: Our biggest challenge was to satisfy all the three major features: Very high speed, extremely low latency, and superb user experience. We needed to make all these happen simultaneously. I think that was our biggest challenge.
Q: Okay. That's interesting. What advice would you give to young people who are entering this field of research?
Tang Zhenfei: I think people doing research especially need to have a future-oriented mindset because our work is for the future. The future has unlimited possibilities. In other words, the future is full of uncertainty for people doing research, independent thinking and judgment are perhaps the most important traits.
Humanity does not evolve linearly. The pattern can be exponential. Maybe at some point 30 years from now, the singularity will occur, moving the world in a direction we can barely fathom today.