Huawei has signed deals with Swedish operator TeliaSonera and Italian operator TIM covering research and development of 5G and Internet of Things (IoT) solutions.
The memorandum of understanding (MoU) with TeliaSonera established a strategic partnership to scope out 5G technologies for high-bandwidth services, the company said at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.
Specifically, the pair are looking to identify use cases to expand 5G opportunities in vertical markets, alongside consumer sectors.
They suggested use cases will cover such applications as IoT, public safety and natural disaster, as well as “higher user mobility”, and seek to establish new revenue streams for the pair, besides traditional mobile broadband subscriptions.
TeliaSonera and Huawei have a long relationship, having first debuted for the global market LTE in Norway in 2009.
“This partnership with Huawei is one step to enable the establishment of technology, ecosystem and business value proposition for the commercialisation of 5G technologies,” said Mats Svärdh, Vice President and Head of Network and Infrastructure at TeliaSonera.
Meanwhile, Huawei announced a similar MoU with TIM , with focus on the development of narrow band IoT (NB-IoT) solutions for low-power, wide area network coverage in support of massive sensor networks. TIM and Huawei will also look to crack new vertical markets through their joint research.
The pair will run laboratory and field trials on NB-IoT solutions with partners from vertical industries, they said. TIM will shortly open a lab for NB-IoT research and innovation in Turin, Italy, where it will work with Huawei and other partners to test and explore new NB-IoT applications.
“We are very optimistic on the development of IoT services that will represent one of the main areas of innovation for TIM. This collaboration will accelerate international standardisation and stimulate industrial synergies with other partners,” said Gabriela Styf Sjoman, Head of Engineering at TIM.
Separately, Huawei said it had achieved live LTE speeds of 1.41Gbps in a trial with Australian operator Optus, and theoretical speeds of 1.43Gbps. The trial of LTE-Advanced Pro, or 4.5G, technology took place at Optus’ Gigasite in Newcastle, north of Sydney, and combined carrier aggregation, high-level modulation, and 4X4 MIMO technologies.
The trial was part of an MoU Huawei signed with Optus parent Singtel in 2014 to develop 4.5G and 5G technologies in partnership.
Dennis Wong, acting Managing Director at Optus, said: “We continue to utilise our network and spectrum assets to test our network of the future and prepare for 5G. By 2020, 5G will be here and we are committed to identify ways to prepare our network to support this new technology and further improve customer experience.”