USD2 Billion Investment in 5G over 10 Years Makes Huawei a Global Leader

3G and 4G gave birth to the mobile Internet, which has profoundly changed the way we live. With 5G, the focus would not only be on connections between people; it would also extend the network to connected things. 5G would provide fiber-like connection speeds. It would offer almost zero latency, massive connectivity, and super-large capacity. 5G will provide the foundation for new applications in every industry, and will bring us into a digital and fully connected world.

In 2009, Huawei invested USD600 million to begin the research into 5G technology. In 2016, we invested an additional USD1.4 billion in speeding up the end-to-end development process of 5G products for commercial use. By this time, Huawei had spent USD2 billion on researching and developing 5G. This is more than the total spending on 5G by major equipment vendors in the US and Europe put together.

5G requires the use of much higher-frequency bands than 3G and 4G, but high-frequency signals have a shorter range. That means more base stations are needed for 5G networks. Our customers were struggling to increase coverage and cut network construction costs. Huawei worked with industry partners to develop a solution that decoupled the 5G uplink and downlink. Uplink and downlink signals have always traveled on the same band, but this limitation was now making networks harder to build. If the downlink can exploit the high-capacity high bands, while leaving the uplink to existing lower-frequency wavebands, this enables much better coverage and boosts speeds at the edge of a cell. For our customers, this means initial deployment of 5G networks will not involve many additional base stations, greatly shortening their network construction cycles. At the MWC Barcelona 2019, this solution was awarded the "Best Mobile Technology Breakthrough" by GSMA, one of the industry's highest honors.

Huawei offers the best-performance 5G solutions and simplified site solution. We also leverage our leading technologies in multiple fields to provide many unique value points that no other vendor can match.

For example, Huawei's proprietary technologies have enabled us to increase the capacity of microwave transmission from 1 Gbit/s to 20 Gbit/s. This means 5G base stations no longer necessarily have to have a fiber connection. The ultra-broadband backhaul they need can be supplied by microwave, which means that 5G can be deployed more easily.

Huawei continues to lead the industry in developing 5G. As of mid-June of 2019, Huawei signed 50 commercial contracts for 5G with leading operators around the world, and shipped over 140,000 5G base stations.