Huawei says 5G will arrive in 2020

4G has hardly broken a sweat and Huawei is already working on its replacement.

 

In some countries 4G is yet to properly come into effect, but that hasn't stopped Huawei developing its replacement.

Tony Wen, Huawei's lead in 5G technology development, spoke to the Wall Street Journal to explain that the fifth generation of mobile network will deliver a similar experience to that of a fibre broadband connection at home - presumably closer to the 100Mbps speeds we're all supposed to be looking to soon.

However before you get too excited by the thought of even faster browsing speeds on your mobile, Wen warned that the technology won't be ready for another seven years - which means we'll be kept waiting until 2020.

Not alone

It's not just Huawei who is working on 5G though, with the likes of Nokia, Ericsson and Alcatel all joining in as part of an EU funded project to develop the fifth-generation network.

Of course it's not just the networks and back-end systems which need to be developed for 5G, but the handsets themselves - which puts pressure on manufacturers and chip makers to keep up with the rest of the industry.

The CAT4 LTE network is already supported but currently the only handset which can take advantage of the increased speeds it offers is the Huawei Ascend P2 - so things are unlikely to develop all that quickly.