At MWC Shanghai 2024, Huawei made significant strides in advancing 5G technology and network intelligence. The company hosted the Global Launch of the 5G-A Pioneers Program and unveiled plans to integrate AI into networks, aiming to drive the high-quality development of 5G-Advanced (5G-A) networks and seize opportunities in the emerging intelligent world.
The 5G-A Pioneers Program event, themed “driving shared success with 5G-A,” brought together leading 5G operators from around the world, including China’s “big three,” HKT, du, and Oman Telecommunications. This gathering marks a crucial milestone for the 5G industry, as 2024 is set to be the first year of commercial 5G-A deployment following the official freezing of the 3GPP Release-18 standards on June 28, 2024.
5G has become the fastest developing generation of mobile communications technology that we have ever seen. The first standards release for 5G-Advanced – 3GPP Release-18 was officially finalised in Shanghai. This marks a key milestone for the 5G industry, as it will make 2024 the first year of commercial 5G-A deployment.
David Wang, Huawei’s Executive Director of the Board and Chairman of the ICT Infrastructure Managing Board, delivered a keynote speech titled “5G-A: Paving the Way for Shared Success.” He emphasized, “5G-A will be the path forward. It will protect vested investment while creating new business opportunities by expanding business boundaries. As we look towards 2030, the industry as a whole will need to ramp up efforts to reinforce 5G-A technologies and support the healthy development of 5G.”
Huawei and its operator partners jointly announced the 5G-A Pioneers Program and reached six specific consensuses. These focus on promoting Pioneer Operators, Pioneer Cities, Business Model Upgrade, High-quality Networks, Service Innovation, and Thriving Ecosystems. The aim is to maximise the value of advanced 5G-A capabilities and further advance the industry.
Leveraging AI to Elevate Network Productivity
In a separate keynote at the 5G-A & AI Roundtable, Eric Zhao, Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer of Huawei Wireless Solution, unveiled the company’s plan to bring AI to networks. This initiative focuses on building an ecosystem of RAN Intelligent Agent in collaboration with operators to increase network productivity. The first phase aims to cover 1,000 site engineers and 10,000 sites across Hangzhou, Guangzhou, Bangkok, Jinan, and Shenzhen within six months.
The RAN Intelligent Agent is designed to reshape network operations and maintenance (O&M), experience, and services. It provides copilots that support role-based chatbots and agents for scenario-based solution automation. This AI integration is expected to address growing challenges related to complicated O&M, differentiated network characteristics, and diverse experience-driven operations.
Reshape O&M: RAN Intelligent Agent boosts efficiency by simplifying processes. An impressive example is the field maintenance engineer copilot that Huawei has launched. As the first of its kind, the copilot is an AI-based assistant that autonomously generates solution policies based on extensive expert knowledge to significantly increase efficiency. During a field case, it facilitated handling an optical path fault with tenfold efficiency.
Reshape experience: RAN Intelligent Agent enables networks to autonomously optimise experience and energy saving. The optimisation is automated based on multi-dimensional high-precision real-time sensing and the generation and delivery of optimal experience and energy-saving policies. In an area covered by 223 cells, RAN Intelligent Agent has been operating stably for thousands of hours, automatically maximising performance while keeping energy consumption the lowest possible. This is the first time Huawei has worked with operators to implement such automated network O&M.
Reshape services: RAN Intelligent Agent enables experience-driven service operations through the real-time evaluation of network resources. This allows operators to provision new services as soon as needed and ensure a deterministic service experience. The 5G-A livestreaming assurance package is incredibly helpful in this regard. As the world’s first livestreaming package of its kind, it provides fruit farmers with the deterministic uplink speeds that they need to reach customers through livestreaming, offering a good example of how operators innovate business models to accelerate monetisation.
“Our goal is to bring AI to networks. To achieve this, we will, for our part, shift from a solution provider to a co-builder of intelligent networks. We believe that the co-growth of RAN Intelligent Agent and networks will create more extensive business value, transform networks more rapidly, and lead our industry into a new era of intelligence,” Zhao concluded.
MWC Shanghai 2024 is being held from June 26 to June 28 in Shanghai, China. During the event, Huawei will showcase its latest products and solutions at stands E10 and E50 in Hall N1 of the Shanghai New International Expo Centre (SNIEC).
The year 2024 is set to be pivotal for networks, with synergies across networks, cloud, and intelligence giving rise to pervasive intelligent applications and increasingly diverse user experiences. Huawei, along with global operators, industry professionals, and opinion leaders, will explore topics such as amplifying 5G’s success in the 5G-A era and tapping into operator revenue growth potential to accelerate the realisation of an intelligent world.
Discussion about this post