As well as appealing to the consumer market, Huawei’s 5.5G enterprise solutions are being aimed at companies that have been reluctant to use mobile networks in an industrial setting, preferring instead to use w-fi.
In the industrial space, 5G has been applied to applications including machine vision and remote control. According to Wu Hequan, director of the Advisory Committee of the Internet Society of China, and the China Standardization Expert Committee, industrial applications need larger uplink, lower latency, more determinacy, higher security, higher reliability, more massive connectivity, higher-precision positioning, and lower power consumption.
5.5g addresses these concerns by offering speeds 10 times higher than 5G, delivering peak uplink rates of 1Gbps and downlink rates of 10Gbps. According to Wu, 5.5G also improves on three of 5G's features, namely enhanced mobile broadband, ultra-reliable low-latency communication, and massive machine-type communications.
Speaking at Huawei’s 5G Beyond Growth Summit at MWC Barcelona 2024 in February, Alexander Lehrmann, senior director of innovation & development at Sunrise, a Swiss telecoms company , said: “There are so many use cases, in logistics, warehousing, and factories that we haven’t quite been able to reach with 5G. This is where 5.5G will come in and propel us into other areas.”
Huawei said it has already helped operators start 5.5G commercial verification and testing in over 20 cities globally. The Middle East has formed a general consensus on 5.5G development, with all six members of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) having completed 5.5G 10Gbps rate verification and incubation of new services such as passive IoT.
The three major operators in China's mainland have started 5.5G network deployment in major cities, investigating services for connected people, things, vehicles, industries, and homes. In Hong Kong, operators have also completed 5.5G 10Gbps rate testing and verification in the C-band and mmWave and started to provision 5.5G FWA services.
In Europe, Finnish operators have concluded 5.5G technology verification on commercial networks, achieving a peak rate of greater than 10Gbps, and verified the passive IoT technology. In Germany, Huawei said operators operating on the 6GHz band have also achieved a peak rate of 12Gbps using multi-carrier techniques.
Li Peng, Huawei's Corporate senior vice president and president of ICT sales & service said: "We're rapidly approaching an intelligent world. As the demands on networks have increased, 5.5G has become a key step on the path to the intelligent world. 5.5G is expected to enter commercial use in 2024.”
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