Huawei Advocates for Further Innovations in 5G to Reap Full Digital Dividends 

Li Peng, Huawei’s Senior Vice President and President of the Carrier BG, today called for further innovation in 5G to create new value and unleash digital dividends during his keynote at MWC Shanghai 2023. 

He said the industry needs to innovate together to meet increasing digital requirements in both the consumer and industrial markets.

Titled Creating New Value with 5G to Unleash Digital Dividends, his speech discussed how 5G is spearheading the development of the digital industry and enabling the digitalization of all industries.

Li said, “The future is now. New business scenarios for people, homes, businesses, and vehicles are delivering new experiences. This is raising higher requirements for network capabilities. Enhanced network capabilities, like 10 Gbps downlink, 1 Gbps uplink, and 100 billion IoT connections, are creating a vast market space in 5.5G for carriers.”

Connecting people: Demand for new experiences boosts traffic dividends

Currently, the world has over 1.2 billion 5G users. Li explained that the pursuit of the ultimate experience by a large number of users is driving the development of innovative content and applications as well as the construction of 5G networks that can deliver a 10 Gbps experience.

Huawei predicts that these applications and content will also spur a 10-fold surge in traffic. For example, the traffic generated by naked-eye 3D content will see a 3- to 10-fold increase compared with 2D videos. A single New Calling user can generate over 1 GB of data per week while one cloud phone user can generate over 1 GB of data a day.

5G spectrum will also be crucial for achieving the ultimate user experience. Li said that the industry needs access to new frequency bands, including the 6 GHz and mmWave bands, as well as the sub-100 GHz spectrum for 5G New Radio.

Huawei has already worked with multiple carriers to perform technical verification for the 6 GHz band. Field tests show that a 10 Gbps downlink can be achieved on the 6 GHz band and that the band can also achieve co-coverage with C-band for a single site.

Connecting homes: Huge room for smart life dividends

In the consumer market, skyrocketing demand for new experiences has led to a boom in innovative forms of content and applications, like naked-eye 3D, smart home management, and whole-house intelligence. This has prompted carriers to upgrade home networks that will deliver a bandwidth of 10 Gbps like private lines.

Li explained that Huawei launched the 5G FWA Square solutions, including FWA Pro for ultrafast connectivity, FWA Lite for cost-effective connectivity, and FWA Biz for highly reliable connectivity. These three solutions can help carriers better meet user needs in various scenarios and expand the 5G FWA market.

Connecting Industries and Machines: A trillion-yuan Market

Since 5G commercialization began four years ago, more than 17,000 private 5G networks have been built globally. These networks have turbocharged digitalization in many industries, with clear economic benefits for early adopters in the manufacturing, port, mining, oil & gas, and healthcare industries.

As industrial digitalization becomes more common, more businesses will integrate digital technology into their production processes and require more advanced network capabilities that 5G can provide.

Together with partners, Huawei helped a customer develop the industry’s first 5.5G-powered flexible production line. The project found that the 5.5G deterministic network guaranteed ultra-high reliability and reduced latency down to 4 milliseconds in a high-concurrency environment.

Connecting vehicles: A new path for carriers

Li also touched on the popular topic of autonomous vehicles during his speech. Constant progress is being made in the areas of connected vehicles and the Internet of Vehicles (IoV). ICT services are essential for intelligent connected vehicles, Vehicle to Everything (V2X), and connected intelligence.

5.5G will help cars sense their surroundings much more clearly. An IoV with advanced sensing is a core component of intelligent traffic light systems, navigation on rainy and foggy days, beyond-line-of-sight sensing, and more. Level-4 autonomous vehicles are expected to hit the commercial market in 2025 and will require massive amounts of computing power and strong networks.

An autonomous car generates hundreds of terabytes of data each day and needs to upload about one terabyte of that data to the cloud to support AI model training and algorithm updates.

Li said that Huawei will deepen its partnership with the industry to support these huge demands for computing power on clouds and intelligent real-time computing. The connectivity and computing markets are expected to become promising areas of growth for carriers.