#Huawei unveils Europe 5G progress, $20M fund

LIVE FROM HUAWEI PRODUCT AND SOLUTIONS LAUNCH 2020, LONDON: Huawei carrier business group president Ryan Ding (pictured) vaunted the company’s progress winning 5G network contracts, announcing it secured 91 commercial deals, more than half of which are within Europe.

Speaking as the US continues a long-running campaign to try and persuade European countries to ban the vendor, Ding said 47 of its commercial 5G contracts are with partners in the region. Of the remainder, 27 are with operators located in Asia.

The executive highlighted the company’s 5G developments during 2019 in core and RAN equipment, including lighter base station equipment and advanced core network technology, claiming competitors continued to lag its technology.

Ding also illustrated a number of projects to drive business models and enterprise use cases for the new technology.

As part of its attempts to encourage innovation around 5G, Ding detailed a $20 million investment in a 5G Partner Innovation Programme based in the UK, to be spent over the next five years. Projects will make use of the company’s existing innovation centre in the country.

On the operator business case for the new network technology, Ding pointed to the ability to differentiate consumer connectivity outside of price with the ability to offer tariffs based on specific values such as low-latency or high bandwidth.

“Competition in 4G is only based on a price war on traffic,” he said. “On 5G operators can differentiate on new metrics,” pointing to the prospect of innovations including VR gaming and ultra-high definition video-on-demand.