Huawei's rotating CEO discusses demands of 5G

MADRID -- Guo Ping, Huawei Technologies board chairman and rotating CEO, looked ahead on Tuesday to what the mobile telecommunications industry has to do to prepare for the arrival of 5G.

Considered vital for the Internet of Things (IoT), 5G "will bring fundamental changes in the way society functions and how people live," while the total available market brought about by the transformation "will reach 15 trillion US dollars by 2025," he said.

The commercial rollout of 5G is not expected to come into wide scale use before 2020 at the earliest and the Huawei CEO believes much still has to be done to prepare for its arrival.

Speaking in the 'Mobile World Daily' magazine distributed at the Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona, Guo explained that by 2025, "the world will have about 100 billion connections," and that "55 percent of them will stem from business applications and smart cities, and another 45 percent from consumer areas such as smart homes, the Internet of vehicles and wearables."

Guo highlighted that currently, "99 percent of all equipment remains unconnected to the Internet," so, "we must improve connectivity by increasing the number of connections that can be supported."

He expected a change in the industry from supply driven to demand driven and "as this change happens, industries will demand more capacity from networks, more bandwidth and less latency," something that will need careful planning.

With video crucial to governments' safe city plans, it will be essential for future mobile networks to "integrate high bandwidth requirements into public networks and use virtual private networks to provide services," said Guo.

Another requirement for 5G getting off the ground is the redefinition of network capabilities. "Carriers need to establish software defined architecture, achieve agile operations and develop big data capabilities," he explained, highlighting Huawei's launch of SoftCOM architecture to help "develop virtualized networks and move networks to the cloud," and that trials have also begun into the use of Big Data.