Many people carry smartphones or iPads with the best current technology called 4G. We watch videos and communicate with friends around the world. While this technology is advanced, its throughput speed is too slow and its reactive speed or latency is too long to guide autonomous vehicles or support virtual reality machines.
The next generation of wireless technology, 5G, will have speeds more than 100 times faster than 4G and latency reduced to a millisecond. Who is in the lead in developing 5G? The answer is Huawei, a Chinese company.
Huawei is one of the largest, if not the largest, manufacturer of electronic equipment in the world. It is the largest seller of smartphones in China, and likely the largest manufacturer of wireless network equipment. While other network equipment manufacturers such as Ericsson and Microsoft/Nokia have been reducing their network equipment profile, Huawei has been expanding and is the clear leader in 5G R&D.
Every product in today’s social media-driven world is, in a sense, overhyped. But even taking that into consideration, consumer electronics probably take the cake for most shameless overpromising, and none more than the brouhaha surrounding AI and VR the past couple of years. Every commercial for VR headsets, whether it’s by LG or Samsung or Sony, want you to believe that putting on the device is to step into a truly immersive experience, except no, the pixels are clearly visible, there’s a bit of lag, and the headsets are not comfortable to wear more than 15 to 20 minutes at a time. AI? Don’t even get me started. Bixby, Siri, Google Assistant, Cortana are hardly as smart as its respective tech CEOs claim to be, and Google’s self-driving cars seem to have gotten into quite a few accidents already.
Both VR and AI want so bad to work the way commercials and tech CEOs want them to work, but there’s been virtually zero progress in the past 12 months — VR was hailed as the breakout hit of CES in 2016; by 2017’s event, Facebook-backed Oculus Rift didn’t even have a booth. What gives?
The problem isn’t with the tech per se, it’s that the networks and the data needed aren’t ready.
“Virtual reality, in order to achieve the true immersion needs several hundred gigabits of data, which 4G cannot do wireless right now,” says Qiu Heng, Huawei’s president of wireless marketing operations. “More importantly, the latency for self-driving cars right now is around the 50 millisecond range. That’s also not enough.”
What Qiu is saying is simple: The wifi is too slow. Luckily, a solution is coming soon: 5G.
Qiu says 5G will shave latency for driver-less cars down to 1 millisecond — the difference between braking in time or crashing into a tree — and pump out enough data make VR actually immersive and, like reality, instead of the gimmicky, cartoony, and headache-inducing experience right now. And A.I. will get smarter too, because 5G will, in theory, connect more machines to machines, cities to cities.
“The basic gist of 5G is that it will make VR and AI better, connect machines to machines, take Internet of Things to the next level,” says Qiu. “We estimate that 29 billion devices will be connected by 2021, and 5G will provide the road on which everyone will travel through digitally.”
As a telecommunication giant that provide networking services to more than 170 countries around the world. Covering basically everywhere except North America. Huawei was among one of the world leaders in rolling out 3G and 4G. With 5G, however, Huawei is likely to lead the way. The company began researching on 5G back in 2009, secured polar coding before competitors, introduced the first network splicing router, and recently announced plans to begin preparations for 5G rollouts.
Yang Chaobin, president of Huawei’s 5G product line, says a proof of concept/pilot program of 5G networks should hit major cities by 2019.
To handle 5G networks, a city needs to have more than 100 base stations. Referring to a structure that sends and receives radio signals to form a cellular network.
Final thoughts
Major telecommunication companies all agree — 5G is a more important jump from the last generation than 4G was to 3G and 3G was to 2G, etc. During the 5G conference at the Mobile World Congress two months ago, where companies like Huawei, Nokia, Ericcson and AT&T laid out their plans for 5G connectivity. 5G, they will tell you, is bigger than just being able to download the entire Godfather trilogy in 10 seconds (actually, skip Godfather III). 5G can let one central factory control heavy machinery across an entire city or state, or help government “smarten up” cities: think a garbage can that knows when it’s full, or traffic lights and signs that know if there’s an accident further down the road and help ease congestion accordingly. If 4G tech built us a road, then 5G tech will build a city.
