(Asia Times) 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.
