Huawei’s goal to dominate the roll-out of 5G is off to a good start, as the company has announced that it has completed the shipment of its 10,000th 5G base station. The announcement was made at the 9th Global Mobile Broadband Forum, which took place in London earlier this week.
The roll-out of 5G has oddly been rather politically charged, with Huawei having been barred from supplying equipment to Australia or the USA for their 5G deployments. That hasn’t stopped other nations from jumping on the Huawei bandwagon, however, with the firm confirming that the 10,000 shipments are all out of China, in places like Europe, the Middle East and South Korea.
One example of telecoms working with Huawei on the deployment of these 5G base stations can be found close to home. Earlier this year, Three UK announced that it had selected Huawei’s equipment to provide the backbone for its 5G network; with the Chinese firm beating out both Nokia and Samsung. Now Three is working closely with Huawei on a home broadband trial, which will see 5G deliver connection speeds of up to 2Gbps to customers.
Both Three UK and Huawei are aiming to publicly launch 5G services in 2019; just in time for the arrival of the first 5G handsets.
It’s not just Three UK that Huawei is working with closer to home. EE has also partnered with the firm for its 5G roll-out. While Three is still in the early test phases, EE has already announced when its 5G network will go live to the public. The BT-owned network will go live with 5G in London, Edinburgh, Belfast, Manchester, Birmingham and Cardiff in 2019.
“5G will start a technology revolution,” Ken Hu, Huawei’s rotating chairman, noted. “It will bring new power to all ICT technologies, and trigger sweeping changes in business. There will be new opportunities the likes of which we’ve never seen.”
