Rotating CEO of Huawei Ken Hu On 5G

5G is coming to us quickly and we anticipate that 2018 will be the first year for the commercial deployment of 5G. The market is getting ready very, very fast. Firstly, the standard is ready. We all know that the 3GPP Release 15 is ready to go, and this is a big step forward. Secondly, the demand is ready because we all know that in some markets, subscribers are consuming more than 70 gigabytes of data per month, and video traffic is growing so fast. Industrial applications are on the rise, for example, the IoT is getting bigger and bigger every day. From our trials around the world with our customers, we observed that the 5G solution can greatly help carriers to enhance spectral efficiency by five times, and it can also help carriers to boost network capacity by 24 times. Looking forward, the 5G solution will also give carriers access to different industrial applications. This will help the whole industry to build a very solid business case for investment in 5G. And the last is technology. The technology is ready as well. For example, this year Huawei brings our end-to-end 5G solution to Barcelona. So generally speaking, standards are set, demand is real, and the technology is available. So we're ready to go for 5G.

Now we do have some progress to share. So in this year, our end-to-end solution of 5G has passed, and this is the industry's first complete line of products for 5G, including the core, the transport, the video, the wireless access, and particularly the terminal. We launched the industry's first ready-to-market 5G device, the CPE, in this show. And in next year, we're going to launch our smartphone with 5G technology. Huawei began working on 5G around 10 years ago. We've spent around 600 million US dollars on research of 5G technology, and in this year, we're going to spend another 800 million on the development of products and solutions.

We're working with pre-commercial projects with continuous coverage in different big cities, including Milan, Tokyo, London, Seoul, and Munich. And the results are just incredible. For example, we provide gigabit download speed through the entire pilot area. That means the consumer can enjoy high-speed access at any time, anywhere in the region. So that's just amazing. And even cooler, we provide 2 gigabits per second speed for the household, and this is just as fast as fiber. We can call that 'fiber from the sky.' I can tell carriers to realize the full potential of 5G. I think firstly, the telcos can consider to get their network ready for 5G technology. I believe that the carriers can stay competitive and better meet the faster-growing demands from consumers in terms of data traffic. And I also believe that a stronger network capacity can bring greater opportunity. And secondly, 5G will be a joint effort through different stakeholders. So the telcos can try to get the vertical industries involved, because we believe that 5G could be a cornerstone for the industrial revolution across the world, and it could be a lever for the digital transformation in different vertical industries. So we need to get the vertical industries involved and let them understand what 5G can do for their business. The digital transformation also means a new growth of revenue for the telco carriers. So for that purpose, Huawei has built the X Labs and the Open Lab as an open platform for the carriers and the vertical players to work together to figure out, to develop the business, and to trial the technological solution. And we also encourage that all the carriers and the vendors and all stakeholders can better engage with each other in initiatives like 5GAA and also the Alliance which was just announced by GSMA this time, the 5G Alliance. So we believe that for 5G, there is massive potential out there. If we want to have it, we need to act now and act together.