Huawei wants to be a one-stop shop for all things
5G. It unveiled the Balong 5000 chipset and the world’s first 5G core chip, the
Tiangang. The Balong 5000 is a multi-mode modem supporting 2G, 3G, 4G and 5G
and will be used in anything from smartphones to cars. Its first application is
in the Huawei 5G CPE Pro router.
It supports both sub-6GHz 5G where it achieves
speeds of up to 4.6Gbps as well as mmWave where it goes up to 6.5Gbps. That’s
actually too fast for the router’s Wi-Fi 6, which tops out at 4.8Gbps. Long story short, you can
download a 1GB file in 3 seconds and blow through your data cap in the blink of
an eye.
For cars, the Balong 5000 offers
vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communication that allows cars to connect with
other cars, the electrical grid (for charging electric vehicles) and even
pedestrians. The chip can work in both standalone and non-standalone 5G modes. The
latter uses existing 4G networks as a backbone (while providing next-gen speeds
where available) and will be used during the transitional period.
Speaking of, the Tiangang 5G core chip features
multiple improvements that mean a 5G base station can be installed in half the
time it took to deploy a 4G station. The chip supports active antennas that are
50% smaller, 23% lighter and use 21% less power than previous designs. It has 2.5x the computational
capacity of previous chips and one Tiangang can control 64 channels and up to
200MHz of bandwidth.
For the backend, Huawei has developed an AI-powered
data center switch, which promises zero packet loss on Ethernet networks and
end-to-end latency of under 10 milliseconds.
