Road to China: What is 5G and When is it Coming?

When I saw the UKTI agenda for our trade mission, the immediate attraction was our visit to Huawei and their research and development facility in Shenzhen. Emerald supply Huawei mobile WiFi devices in the UK particularly to satellite offices, often on construction sites, that either need temporary internet access or easy and immediate internet access before hardwired broadband can be facilitated. Huawei also worked extensively with EE on the 4G rollout and in many areas their mobile WiFi devices are faster than the available broadband.

There are mixed feelings about 4G as cities like London and Manchester benefit from super fast speeds whilst smaller towns and rural areas struggle to even make a decent phone call. Without getting on a soapbox, I am a firm believer that the government should invest in our communications network infrastructure including mobile network and high speed broadband, ahead of projects like HS2. Companies rely on the transfer of business-critical voice and data communication in real-time and it is our mobile network that has to facilitate this. All too often it is not up to the task and signal is the biggest complaint we have at Emerald.

My visit to Huawei is best described as a child visiting a sweet factory! The manufacturers have been working with the University of Surrey, Imperial, and Vodafone since 2009 on 5G with standardisation due to complete in 2018 and commercialisation in 2020. To date, Huawei have invested $600m in the development of 5G including lamppost cell sites and base stations to ensure total coverage in all urban areas. To give you an idea of speed, 5G will mean our smartphones will transfer data up to 1,000 times faster than they do now. That’s a HD movie downloaded in less than 30 seconds. How big is your music library? 10Gbps means you can download over 2,500 songs from iTunes in a minute.

But it’s the use for businesses I am most interested in. Video conferencing is going to become more crucial as businesses realise the importance of flexible working to attract the most talented employees and make the most of their workforce’s potential. Plus the amount of business critical data necessary to transfer between mobile devices is getting larger and larger. According to recent IBM statistics, globally we create 2.5 quintillion bytes of data every day (that’s 25 billion billions). Whether you like the buzz term ‘Big Data’ or not, it’s clear that the businesses that harness their crucial data and its transfer most efficiently and effectively are the businesses that are going to profit moving forward.

At Emerald, we help our customers improve efficiency and reduce costs straight away but we also look at how we can help them plan for the future. The 4G rollout has not gone smoothly and has caused different levels of pain for many SMEs. I was excited by Huawei’s focus on the development of new options for mobile network infrastructure rather than relying on outdated phone masts so I hope lessons have been learnt and am looking forward to the benefits of 5G and a better connected UK!

This was first published in 2016