4.5G Broadband to Open Digital World and Expand Middle East Business Opportunities

Mobilk - Meeting the region’s anticipated increase in mobile data demand, Huawei—a leading global ICT solutions provider—has charted a roadmap for the telecom industry’s evolution towards 4.5G broadband services, specifying the core drivers, technologies and business impact of such services. 

More than 800 experts from the global ICT industry convened this week in Dubai to discuss 4.5G and other emerging technologies during the annual LTE MENA 2015 conference. Huawei—a Diamond Sponsor of this year’s forum—partnered with telecom operators, analysts, regulators, and a host of other technology pioneers to put the MENA region at the forefront of today’s connected world.  

Since their inception, wireless technologies have experienced swift evolution in terms of capacity and speed. This is in part due to the massive expansion of mobile data traffic worldwide, which could grow an astonishing 59% in 2015 alone, according to Gartner.

Expected to be commercially launched in 2016, Huawei’s plans for 4.5G will lead mobile communications into the Gigabit era for the first time and spearhead the next phase of the mobile communications industry. The standard is expected to fill the void between 4G and 5G networks while satisfying public’s current demands for high-defnition mobile video, machine to machine (M2M) connections, and faster mobile connections

“From the outset, the realization of 4.5G was to provide operators with several business advantages to effectively overcome foreseeable restraints on digital business growth,” says Ying Weimin, President of Huawei Wireless Network Research and Development. “It opens the era of the Internet of Everything as well as service-oriented network architecture prior to 5G being commercialized. With ambitious mobile broadband plans already underway, we believe that the Middle East will help lead the development of 4.5G globally.”

Key features of 4.5G technology include the ability to have lower latency to 10ms, more than 1Gbps throughput, and the support of 100,000 connections per cell. According to Huawei, this means a 100-fold increase in capacity compared to most 4G networks today plus a reduction of latency by 5-fold. The reduced latency will mean network responsiveness from an end-user perspective will be reduced to just a few milliseconds. 

“In the next five years, we will see amazing advancements as a result of more powerful mobile broadband. The emergence of virtual reality is expected to offer the public immersive HD experiences from gaming all the way to new business opportunities such as virtual shopping. The Internet of Things will be realized with billions of connections linking everything from cars to electronic devices, all supported by mobile networks. That mobility will in turn facilitate Industry 4.0; elevating all industries to a new level of intelligence in which digital systems are able to communicate and cooperate with humans using real-time connectivity,” adds Weimin.

In terms of technical organization, 4.5G architecture will give operators higher order multiple-input and multiple-output (MIMO) capabilities as well as massive Carrier Aggregation (CA) potential. Not only does the technology benefit existing 4G users, but it also supports LTE-M applications which are specially designed for smart city projects and dealing with the massive connections of IoT, deeper cover, and low power consumption.

To date Huawei has trialed a number of 4.5G solutions globally. These include Giga throughput demonstrations and recent LTE-M trials in Europe and Asia. Huawei notes that this year will likely be the first year to see such trials arrive in the Middle East.