The company's rotating Chairman Eric Xu also announced it will launch an end-to-end 5G solution in the second half of 2018. In a tweet Moor Insights analyst Anshel Sag said Huawei plans to release its first 5G smartphone in the third quarter of 2019. Rival Chinese brand Vivo plans to launch its first 5G-capable smartphone next year as well, using Qualcomm's X50 5G NR modem.
Other companies that have partnered with Qualcomm for 5G modem include Xiaomi, Nokia brand licensee HMD Global, Sony, LG, HTC, Oppo, and ZTE. "We are fully committed to 5G investment and by the second half of this year, we're going to launch an end-to-end 5G solution," Xu said on Tuesday.
Speaking during his keynote at the 2018 edition of the Huawei Analyst Summit (HAS), Xu said 5G will result in faster speed and decrease networking costs. "5G is just another product line at Huawei. It is a natural evolution of the technology - from 2G to 3G to 4G and now 5G," Xu told the gathering. According to Xu, there is no fundamental difference between 4G and 5G and for the consumers, it is all about faster speed. "We don't have other material differences in experiences for the consumer between the two technologies," he said. The executive said that 4G infrastructure today is robust and the 5G technology will first be targeted at dense areas to meet growing demand from the consumers for more bandwidth.
When asked about the US restricting access to China-made smartphones and telecoms infrastructure owing to security concerns, Xu refused to comment directly but said Huawei's position in the US market has not changed. "We're focused on what we can do and provide better services to our customers,' Xu said. According to him, Artificial Intelligence (AI) will help the telecom industry worldwide to improve networks. In February, Huawei and telecom services provider Bharti Airtel announced to have successfully conducted 5G network trial under a test set-up in India. The trial was conducted at Airtel's Network Experience Centre in Manesar (Gurugram).
During the test trial, a user throughput of more than 3Gbps was achieved. This is the highest measured throughput for a mobile network in 3.5GHz band with 100MHz bandwidth and end-to-end network latency of approximately 1 msec, the company said. "We have been focusing on developing 5G ecosystem and use cases and the show with Bharti Airtel impressively demonstrates the performance capability of 5G in 3.5GHz band," said Emmanuel Coelho Alves, Director, Wireless Marketing, Huawei HQ.
The company, which began investing in 5G research in 2009, is aiming to invest $600 million in the 5G technology by end of this year. "The 5G era is approaching, and we are confident that 5G deployment in India will happen in line with global timeline," Jay Chen, CEO, Huawei India, told IANS recently. Huawei in September last year released its 5G-oriented mobile bearer solution 'X-Haul' for operators in India to build end-to-end 5G networks.
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