Huawei Pledges £5m to 5G Research Center in the UK

Huawei is very serious when it comes to the development of the next generation mobile network. They have now pledged £5 million towards 5G research at the University of Surrey here in the UK. While this is just a small drop of the $600 million pledged to spend globally in 2018 by Huawei, it is somewhat special as it will be a real-world test instead of closed-lab tests.

The new research center will be completed in three stages. The first phase is scheduled to be completed around April 2015 where the testing will start. The final phase is scheduled to be completed by September 2015 and will present a fully working and operational test bed.

The University of Surrey will have a live 5G infrastructure covering its whole campus of around 17,000 staff members and students. The hope is to demonstrate live 5G technologies before the start of 2018 while still staying on track for a complete rollout in the UK for 2022.

The 5G definition isn’t defined yet and still in the distant future, but Huawei said the technology is capable of delivering between one and ten gigabits per second. This is a truly impressive speed considering most of us run one gigabit ethernet in our own homes and it’s only Google Fiber fixed-lines that offer 1 gigabit internet transfer.

Thanks to TheNextWeb for providing us with this information

Images courtesy of TheNextWeb