Huawei said telcos will need 500 megahertz of additional spectrum
HONG KONG – Mobile telecom operators globally will need to double the number of base stations by 2020 in order to meet increasing demand for mobile broadband connectivity. In a keynote speech at Huawei Global Mobile Broadband Forum, David Wang, Huawei’s president of the wireless network product line, said operators will need to deploy 10 million sites compared to the current 5 million sites.
Huawei is targeting a total of 6.7 billion mobile broadband connections by 2020, compared to 2.68 billion connections at the end of last year. According to Huawei, 3.54 billion mobile broadband connections will use LTE technology by 2020, up from 444 million at year-end 2014.
Wang also said that telcos will need to increase the speed of mobile broadband services by 100 times – to 1 gigabit per second by 2020 compared to the current speed of 10 megabits per second.
The executive said that in order to achieve the 6.7 billion figure, operators also will need a significant amount of additional spectrum – another 500 megahertz in order to meet mobile broadband demand. “Operators will need to double their spectrum resources,” he said.
Wang also noted video is expanding its contribution to overall traffic in mobile broadband networks, saying video currently represents up to 80% of the total traffic for some operators in developed markets.
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“By 2020, video will account for approximately 70% of total traffic, not only in developed markets but also in emerging markets,” Wang added.
The 2015 Global Mobile Broadband Forum was jointly hosted by Huawei and the GSMA. This year the event attracted approximately 1,000 guests. Participants included mobile operators, industry partners and media representatives.
During the Forum, 25 speakers from GSMA, CMCC, Telefónica, Vodafone, Orange, Telecom Italia, SoftBank, Google, Bosch and others gave presentations. In the 2015 Global MBB Forum exhibition area, along with Huawei, industry partners such as SAIC Motor, Bosch, Facebook and Parrot demonstrated new enabling technologies and new business applications.
Huawei paid for travel costs to the Huawei Global Mobile Broadband Forum.