Huawei noted that a 5.5G network trial was conducted onsite during a local festival, which recorded a maximum uplink speed exceeding 500Mbps
Chinese vendor Huawei and China Unicom Guangdong announced that they carried out a trial of “5.5G”, or 5G-Advanced.
In a release, the vendor noted that the 5.5G trial was carried out during the recent “Zengcheng Lychee Live Streaming Festival” in Guangzhou’s Zengcheng District.
At the event, influencers and live streamers used a 5G live streaming service to promote and sell lychees. A 5.5G network trial was also conducted onsite during the festival; it recorded a maximum uplink speed exceeding 500 Mbps. Huawei claimed that this test represented the first trial of 5.5G during a live stream in China’s countryside.
By using intelligent network elements and 5G slicing technologies, China Unicom Guangdong and Huawei have built 5G networks that are able to provide better quality of service (QoS) for live streaming service plans, supporting 50% more traffic and 4-fold faster uplink speeds for standard users, Huawei said.
Hou Yingzhen, president of Huawei’s 5G marketing and solution sales department, said: “Huawei will constantly innovate in products and technologies to both extend the benefits of 5G to more people, and support 5.5G commercial deployment. 5.5G brings about a 10-fold improvement over 5G, supporting 100 billion connections and 10 Gbps speeds.”
“It will be vital for network infrastructure in an intelligent world. 5.5G will drive the live streaming economy in China and contribute to quality growth in both rural areas and the broader agriculture industry. It also has the potential to accelerate the digitalization of many more industries,” he said.
Huawei launched what it claimed to be the world’s first “5.5G” intelligent core network during an event at MWC 2024, which took place in Barcelona, Spain, earlier this year.
The announcement was made by George Gao, president of Huawei cloud core network product line. Gao said that 2024 will be the first year for commercialization of 5.5G or 5G-Advanced.
Huawei believes that previous investments made by operators to deploy 5G network infrastructure will be protected with the future launch of 5G-Advanced, Huawei’s president of wireless solution, Cao Ming, previously said during a media roundtable at Huawei’s 14th Global Mobile Broadband Forum (MBBF), held In October 2023 in Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates.
The executive said that 5G-Advanced networks will not require large investments by operators in new network architecture and will be launched using 5G Standalone (SA) networks. He also said that Huawei is working with its partners to make sure that future 5.5G applications, devices and services will be fully compatible with current 5G networks.
