Chinese telecom giant Huawei has announced that it will invest more than half a billion dollars over the next five years to develop 5G mobile network technologies. The firm, one of the largest mobile phone manufacturers in the world and an important developer of wireless technologies, revealed its research and development intentions on Wednesday in a statement on the Huawei website, according to Reuters. The development of 5G technologies could boost wireless transmission speeds multiple orders of magnitude beyond their current levels with 4G LTE technology.
While the technology is still quite a ways into the future, Huawei sees 5G networks delivering data speeds 100 times faster than existing networks. The company notes that its $600 million investment is geared toward developing the mobile network technologies, and it does not include any further investment in the development of 5G products.
“While we continue to evolve our existing 4G network capabilities, we plan to invest a minimum of $600 million over the next five years on research and innovation for 5G mobile network technologies to ensure that we are meeting consumers’ demands for increasingly faster and better connections,” Eric Xu, Huawei’s current rotating chief executive, said in a statement.
Huawei expects that 5G networks will be ready for commercial deployment by 2020.
