Ooredoo Qatar aims for 2018 5G network deployment, 2020 commercial launch

Ooredoo Qatar says that the first stages of its next-generation 5G network will be deployed by 2018, leading to 5G services being commercially available by 2020. Quoted by Qatari newspaper The Peninsula, Waleed Al Sayed, CEO of Ooredoo Qatar, told reporters on the sidelines of Ooredoo Group’s AGM: ‘We are already working to build the first R&D Centre and also a research laboratory with Huawei, which is going to be open for professionals soon. We are ready to implement 5G in Qatar as soon as it is standardised and available commercially. The building is ready, and it will take another one year to be operational as we are in the process of putting in place the needful equipment and support services. So the challenge is how fast the [standardisation] can be brought forward to launch 5G.’ Once 5G networks are rolled out in Qatar, peak mobile internet speeds are expected to jump to between 1Gbps and 10Gbps. TeleGeography’s CommsUpdate noted in November 215 that Ooredoo Group and Sweden’s Ericsson signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) for 5G development ‘with the ambition of developing use cases, requirements and deployment scenarios for 5G technologies’.