Huawei Invests £2.4bn In Broadband Research

Huawei has committed to spending $4 billion (£2.46m) in the research and development of fixed broadband technologies over the next three years, allowing carriers and internet service providers to cope with growing demand for cloud, 5G, and M2M services, along with 4K video.

Speaking at the Huawei Ultra Broadband Forum in London, Huawei products and solutions president Ryan Ding said the development of fixed broadband had reached a turning point and that 2014 would be the starting point for 4K video.

Huawei fixed investment

“Ultra broadband has become a transformative force that connects our world in a way previously thought unimaginable,” he told the audience, claiming connectivity was now a vital part of infrastructure and government policy and “as important to social economic prosperity as power and water.”

Development will focus on improving pipeline capacity through chips, algorithms, silicon photonics and other basic technology and on Software Defined Network (SDN) and Network Functionality Virtualisation (NFV) so new, open innovations can be deployed and  to make infrastructure easier to manage.

Ding added that the Chinese firm expected there to be 100 billion connected devices by 2020, with many people in the developing world connecting to the Internet for the first time. He said that basic connectivity represented only the “tip of the iceberg” in terms of the services that can be offered, with the potential of the cloud given particular emphasis.

“We know the cloud will be the most critical factor in the carriers’ future strategy,” he said.

“In the past, when we talked about broadband, we only talked about bandwidth, but this is not everything. We must also talk about latency and links. We should put everything together.”

What do you know about fibre broadband? Take our quiz!