PRESS RELEASE: At MWC Barcelona 2024, Huawei held the 5G Industry Evolution Summit themed “Building High-Quality 5G Networks for the 5.5G Era“, where leading operators, industry partners, and opinion leaders, gathered to discuss the future of the 5G industry.

Ritchie Peng, President of Huawei’s Wireless 5G&LTE TDD Product Line, spoke at the event, highlighting that “over the past five years, 5G has driven eight rapid changes in the industry, networks, and technologies. These changes are helping us accelerate ever faster towards 5.5G. Huawei will continue to pursue innovation on a wide array of areas, including ELAA, green solutions, and intelligent networks, to help operators evolve towards multi-carrier 5.5G with premium experience.”

The eight changes have already made big waves in the industry:

1. 5G experience has well exceeded that of 4G. This can be seen in the enhanced video experience enabled by 5G’s ubiquitous Gbps capability. Currently, more than 60% of video content is produced at 720p or higher and 60 frames per second (FPS) — double what it was before. Improved wireless home broadband connectivity has led to a boom in immersive, higher-definition application, such as cloud gaming and multipoint videos.

2. 5G is driving new types of business growth. Operators around the world are rolling out increasingly diverse data plans that feature high-speed experience, promoting network monetization based on the business models that are less centered on data traffic and more focused on speed. Enhanced uplink performance and reduced latency are playing a key role in these new network monetization strategies.

3. 5G is driving growth in global connections. Thanks to upgrades in ultra-reliable low-latency communication (URLLC) technologies, 5G is increasingly cost-effective, enabling application in more core production processes. The reduced capability (RedCap) and Passive IoT ecosystem is maturing at an accelerating pace to expand connections to all scenarios.

4. Multi-carrier networks are becoming increasingly favored. 80% of 5G operators have turned to TDD large bandwidth to deliver Gbps, which has supported growth in the multi-band ecosystem. 35% of operators have TDD spectrum in more than two bands, while mainstream devices are almost all now multi-carrier capable.

5. millimeter wave (mmWave) has become essential to 5.5G. High-frequency AAUs (HAAUs) have improved the coverage and mobility of mmWave networks — a necessary step for 5.5G adoption. In China, these AAUs are already seeing commercial use, enabling commercial enhanced mobile broadband (eMBB) services that deliver peak speeds of 10 Gbps and average speeds of 5 Gbps.

6. Extremely large antenna array (ELAA) has become the preferred choice on 5.5G. ELAA allows operators to upgrade sites to have more antenna elements and support more bands, which is a critical first step for 5.5G xGbps.

7. “0 Bit 0 Watt” is becoming a new benchmark for green networks. 5G has twice the peak-to-average traffic ratio of 4G, in both busy and idle hours. This has made energy saving an increasingly more urgent priority for operators. Huawei has released a full series of equipment to help operators achieve never-before-seen levels of energy saving at both the site and network levels.

8. Telecom foundation models and digital twin systems are quickly bringing the industry ever closer to L4 network intelligence. Huawei IntelligentRAN supports L4 intent-driven network intelligence, enabling fault prevention and prediction, service intent sensing, and multi-objective decision-making in mobile networks.

These eight changes reflect how far the industry has been to delivering 5G and how close it is to delivering 5.5G. Peng closed out his speech by reaffirming Huawei’s commitment to work with operators and partners to foster a thriving industry ecosystem through relentless innovation to bring the world faster to a new era of commercial 5.5G.