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Huang Yuhong, smiling out at you at left, has just taken charge of the China Mobile Research Institute, one of the top 3 telco labs in the world. She will have the support and funding to make it the best in the world.
I met Huang first at a 2017 conference and she provided me with a major scoop. I approached the CEO of China Mobile with a question about Massive MIMO. He looked down the row and said, “Ask the woman there. She’s our expert.”
Recently, her many public comments have established her as China’s leading expert.
6G needs some scientific breakthroughs and remains in danger of fragmentation.
It remains to be seen whether Open RAN is better or worse.RIC can play a key role in enabling AI and ML capability in the RAN.
We expect to exploit the potential for energy saving in 5G networks, improve energy efficiency assessment, and help partners streamline and integrate with 5G to improve efficiency
In 2017 China Mobile was deploying Massive MIMO in 4G. So was Softbank. Nokia, Ericsson, and the West took 2 years to catch up. (Massive MIMO capacity is 4-10X more than 5G NR. Don’t believe the 5G hype.)
CM is now pioneering Distributed Massive MIMO, the most important breakthrough now reaching the market.
When I discussed Huang with Telus’ respected CTO Ibrahim Gedeon, he immediately recognized the name and told me, “She impressed all of us at NGMN.” (NGMN is a prestigious group of telco technologists, with two dozen CTOs.”)
The dream of every research director is to approach the level of Bell Labs. I doubt the China Mobile Institute will win 9 Nobel Prizes (list below.) But China Mobile is a giant, with a billion customers and resources comparable to the old AT&T. The Chinese government, like AT&T, recognizes the importance of basic research and supports it generously.
Sina reports, “Huang Yuhong has been in charge of China Mobile’s GSM900/1800 dual-band network, GPRS, CMNeT network, IP private network, WLAN, 3G, 4G TD-LTE related technical research, strategy research, specification formulation and testing and other major projects. Technical work and new technology research and standardization work for LTE subsequent evolution and 5G.”
Bell Labs Nobel Prizes
- 1937: Clinton J. Davisson shared the Nobel Prize in Physics for demonstrating the wave nature of matter.
- 1956: John Bardeen, Walter H. Brattain, and William Shockley received the Nobel Prize in Physics for inventing the first transistors.
- 1977: Philip W. Anderson shared the Nobel Prize in Physics for developing an improved understanding of the electronic structure of glass and magnetic materials.
- 1978: Arno A. Penzias and Robert W. Wilson shared the Nobel Prize in Physics. Penzias and Wilson were cited for their discovering cosmic microwave background radiation, a nearly uniform glow that fills the Universe in the microwave band of the radio spectrum.
- 1997: Steven Chu shared the Nobel Prize in Physics for developing methods to cool and trap atoms with laser light.
- 1998: Horst Störmer, Robert Laughlin, and Daniel Tsui, were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for discovering and explaining the fractional quantum Hall effect.
- 2009: Willard S. Boyle, George E. Smith shared the Nobel Prize in Physics with Charles K. Kao. Boyle and Smith were cited for inventing charge-coupled device (CCD) semiconductor imaging sensors.
- 2014: Eric Betzig shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work in super-resolved fluorescence microscopy which he began pursuing while at Bell Labs.
- 2018: Arthur Ashkin shared the Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on “the optical tweezers and their application to biological systems”[42] which was developed at Bell Labs