Huawei on Tuesday reiterated the need for an interim generation of mobile technology to act as a bridge between 4G and 5G, and stuck to its prediction that we will see commercial deployments of so-called 4.5G mobile as early as 2016.
The Chinese vendor unveiled its 4.5G vision late last year. It has now added some detail to that vision.
The firm believes the world needs 4.5G to support emerging technologies and services that rely on mobile, such as virtual reality glasses, smart metering, and drones.
"4.5G is a natural evolution of LTE, and supports new business opportunities and an improved user experience through enhancement of the mobile network’s capacity and capability," said Bob Cai, VP of marketing at Huawei’s wireless network product line business, in a statement.
"This in turn will transition our industry into an all online world with ultra-high speed massive connections and low latency, allowing all of us to be fully prepared for the large-scale arrival of applications for cellular IoT," he said.
4.5G will allow for speeds of up to 1 Gbps over mobile networks, enabling virtual reality services, such as glasses that offer an immersive HD experience, Huawei said.
It added that while LTE is essentially designed for smartphone use, 4.5G will be better suited to serving the Internet of Things (IoT). It will support up to 100,000 connections per cell, 100 times more than existing 4G cells.
4.5G will also boast latency of less than 10 milliseconds, supporting mass-market real-time mobile applications.
"In the next five years, 4.5G will accelerate incredible industry-wide developments, create new and exciting business opportunities, and provide the ultimate user experience," Cai said.
