The excitement at the Chinese manufacturer Huawei has not died down since the announcement of the Huawei Ascend P7. In latest news, Huawei has announced the impending launch of a Cat 6 LTE smartphone during the second half of this year. It must be noted that the Ascend P7 is a Cat 4 LTE device. The confirmation comes directly from the proverbial horse’s mouth, Richard Ren President of Huawei’s European Consumer Division has stated in an interview to uswitch that “in the coming second half of the year, we will launch the Cat6 smartphone.” For the uninitiated, Cat 6 is the next standard of 4G LTE, or LTE Advance, which is theoretically capable of providing up to 300 mbps download speeds. The current high speed standard for 4G LTE is Cat 4 which can theoretically go up to 150 mbps.
It was just a few short days, back in April, when Huawei had announced the successful achievement of 300 mbps download rates along with Qualcomm. The test was completed using Huawei’s SingleRAN equipment and Qualcomm’s 4G multimode LTE modem – Gobi 9×35 – using a 40 MHz wideband spectrum. Though Huawei has as of yet not declared which devices will offer Cat 6 LTE capabilities, we believe the device will belong to Huawei’s P series of high-end smartphones. With Cat 6 LTE speeds, these would be the fastest devices – in terms of data speeds – available in the market today. Qualcomm has also unveiled their intentions for releasing 64 bit processors -the Qualcomm Snapdragon 810 and 808 – which will bring along 4G LTE at Cat 6 multimode speeds, however these chips would be sent out to device OEMs as samples by the third quarter of this year and we can expect mass availability for devices sometime during the latter half of next year. If Huawei manages to beat Qualcomm on this front, it will be a major feat for the Chinese manufacturer.
On our part though, we will keep our eyes peeled for more news on this mystery device and keep you posted. Would you be willing to buy a Cat 6 LTE smartphone or is your current device sufficing your needs? Shout it out in the comments below.