Huawei has announced that it is constructing a large scale wireless systems (5G) testbed in a real-time environment in Munich in Germany. The Chinese telecommunications vendor has been busy in recent months across central Europe, connecting and buying stakes in comms companies and telcos.
The project will be carried out in collaboration with the Bavarian State Government, City of Munich, Technische Universitat Munchen (TUM) and M-Net where all parties have committed to build the 5G Vertical Industry Accelerator (5G VIA), an experimental system for testing 5G technologies.
The aim is to provide the researchers with a platform for developing algorithms in real-world environments and testing scenarios for different market verticals. Also, it will deliver a collaboration platform for all the ecosystem partners including large private sector companies, SMEs, universities and governments.
The new Munich 5G testbed is a part of the Huawei’s previously announced strategy to invest $600m in research and innovation into 5G technologies by 2018, it says.
The Chinese telecommunications giant made its arrival to Munich some time ago as the company decided to build there its permanent R&D centre. Huawei European Research Centre in Munich is one of the contributors in the Horizon 2020 and 5G infrastructure public-private partnership programme (5G PPP) funded by the EU. It also participates in the European research consortium METIS working on a development of the key technology components for 5G air interface.
The Bavarian State Government welcomes the development of the Huawei’s new testbed. “The 5G testbed is important for future development. In particular, the applications within the framework of Industry 4.0 require efficient mobile communications,” says the Bavarian State Minister for Economic Affairs and Media, Energy and Technology, Ilse Aigner.
According to Huawei, the commercial deployment of the 5G technology will become feasible by 2020. Compared with the 4G systems, 5G will enable lower latency yielding reaction times indiscernible to humans and a 1000-fold improvement in data transmission energy efficiency, it says.