Huawei's Li Peng: Accelerate the prosperity of 5G and its evolution to 5.5G, and accelerate the move towards an intelligent world

From February 27 to March 2, MWC 2023 (2023 Mobile World Congress) will be officially held in Barcelona, ​​Spain. The theme of this year's conference is "VELOCITY", which indicates that the speed of mobile communications will be further improved this year. It also reflects that the industry, which has just emerged from the three-year epidemic, hopes to accelerate the pace of empowering the digital transformation of society with advanced ICT technologies and cope with uncertainty.

This accelerated atmosphere was already very strong at the Huawei Day0 Forum the day before the conference officially started. Li Peng, President of Huawei's Carrier BG, said in his speech that 5G prosperity is the cornerstone of the intelligent world, and 5.5G is a key milestone towards the intelligent world. He called on the industry to base itself on the GUIDE business blueprint, accelerate 5G prosperity and move towards a more prosperous 5.5G era, and accelerate the move towards the intelligent world.

5.5G is the next chapter in the evolution of 5G. Why do both need to press the accelerator at the same time? What are their respective main tasks? From the physical world to the digital world and then to the intelligent world, what is the key path to the future?

5G prosperity is the cornerstone of the intelligent world. Operators are making connectivity longer, wider and thicker.

What does the intelligent world look like? A thousand people may have a thousand pictures in their minds. Everything is sensed, everything is connected, everything is intelligent... In any case, the future intelligent world must represent the continuous upgrading and perfection of capabilities, efficiency, and experience, benefiting every consumer, every family, and every industry organization.

Huawei's Global Industry Vision (GIV) has long explored and described the typical characteristics of the intelligent world in 2030 from the dimensions of clothing, food, housing, transportation, cities, enterprises, and energy, and analyzed the ICT technology support required behind the various beautiful visions. For example, by 2030, the number of connections will reach 100 billion, the network speed will reach 10Gbps, the computing power will increase 100 times, the storage capacity will also increase 100 times, and the use of renewable energy will exceed 50%...

Among all these ICT technologies, connectivity is undoubtedly at the center. Especially since entering the 5G era, connectivity is no longer limited to serving consumers, but is facing the entire industry, and various connectivity + models are constantly emerging. According to GSMA data, 234 mobile operators in 81 countries around the world have launched commercial 5G services, covering ToC, home (5G FWA) and ToB scenarios.

In Li Peng's view, after more than three years of network deployment and commercial practice accumulation, operators are currently making the 5G-based connection+ model longer, wider and thicker.

In the ToC field, leading operators in Asia Pacific, the Middle East and Europe are actively promoting the construction of a digital business ecosystem based on the continuous improvement of network capabilities, "integrating OTT and surpassing OTT", opening up the full digital consumption scenarios of "connection + social, music, TV, personal cloud, and digital content publishing", and becoming a one-stop customer digital experience service provider.

In the home field, the deployment of high-quality home broadband represented by 5G FWA and 10GPON has far exceeded the expectations of operators, achieving excellent results of an ARPU increase of 30%-60% in typical markets such as Europe and the Middle East.

In the ToB field, Chinese operators are deeply promoting "connection +, integration of cloud, AI, security, and platform" to expand new space. The industry's digital revenue will grow by more than 20% in 2022.

It is undeniable that in the 5G era, it is still a short time for operators to move from connection to connection+, and the connection+ model is still in its infancy. However, it is undeniable that 5G has fully demonstrated the possibility of "changing the world". Its combination with new ICT technologies such as cloud computing and AI is accelerating the advancement of technological innovation towards integrated applications, laying the foundation for the future intelligent world.

5.5G is a key milestone towards a smart world. 5G needs to move towards a more prosperous 5.5G era

At the same time, according to the iterative law of mobile communications, which is one generation every ten years and continues to evolve, 5G needs to evolve forward towards 5.5G while doing a good job of connectivity+.

Therefore, in 2020, the 5.5G industry vision of 5G evolution was first proposed by the industry. In April 2021, 3GPP officially named 5G evolution as 5G-Advanced, started the standardization process, and planned to define 5G-Advanced technical specifications through three versions: R18, R19, and R20. At the end of 2021, the first batch of 28 R18 projects were approved, and 5.5G technology research and standardization entered the substantive stage.

Under the common definition of the industry, 5G-Advanced has basically formed key capabilities and features such as 10Gbps downlink, 1Gbps uplink, millisecond-level latency, hundreds of billions of connections, integrated communication perception, and endogenous intelligence for 2025. It will bring ten times the current network capacity and add new capabilities, greatly improving the user experience in various scenarios.

In his speech, Li Peng also pointed out that in the future the intelligent world will be deeply integrated with the physical world. Whether it is personal entertainment life, corporate office, or industrial production, it will enter a new era of intelligent interconnection. This means that the demand for the network will break through from ubiquitous gigabit to ubiquitous 10G, from connection to perception, and from focusing on energy consumption to focusing on energy efficiency.

For example, in terms of ToC, with the gradual popularization of interactive applications such as XR Pro, holographic imaging, and the Metaverse, the personal user experience rate has been upgraded from Gbps to 10Gbps; in terms of ToB, industry applications such as Internet of Vehicles, autonomous driving, and industrial manufacturing require support from new network capabilities such as Gbps-level ultra-large uplink, millisecond-level low latency, and high-precision perception. At the same time, the next generation of networks must also consider the problem of rising energy consumption caused by a 100-fold increase in traffic.

Therefore, it can be said that the evolution of 5G to 5.5G is a key milestone that carries the above breakthroughs and accelerates the move toward the intelligent world. It is foreseeable that as more high-traffic 5G use cases move from "model houses" to "commercial houses", the urgency of the evolution of existing networks to 5.5G will become more prominent.

Based on the GUIDE business blueprint, we will work together to accelerate the development of an ultra-broadband, green and intelligent future world

Now that we have found the starting point and milestones, what is the key path to the future intelligent world? Li Peng proposed that the entire industry work together to accelerate the path to an ultra-wide, green, and intelligent future world based on the GUIDE business blueprint.

At last year's MWC conference, Huawei further expanded the connotation of GUIDE, namely building ubiquitous gigabit connections, accelerating hyperautomation to cope with uncertainty, providing intelligent "computing & networking" services, enabling differentiated experiences on demand, and achieving sustainable development through green ICT.

From this, we can see that the GUIDE business blueprint has accelerated the deep integration of connectivity, green and smart technologies on the one hand, and promoted the effective interlocking of business and technology values ​​on the other hand, and can be regarded as a reference guide for operators' network evolution. In other words, the GUIDE business blueprint is the key path from the prosperity of 5G to the more prosperous 5.5G era, accelerating towards the intelligent world.

In fact, the main features of the future intelligent world have been reflected in the key path of the GUIDE business blueprint, namely the three keywords frequently mentioned by Li Peng in his speech: ultra-wide, green and intelligent. He said that Huawei is willing to work together with the entire industry to achieve a 10G experience through breakthroughs in root technologies in the fields of wireless, optical and IP; to extend connectivity to perception through the exploration of scenarios such as vehicle-road collaboration and environmental monitoring; and to build a unified energy efficiency indicator system and coordinate industry green development plans.

Green is the word that needs to be emphasized here, because the theme of the Day0 Forum summit is green ICT development. The NCIe indicator proposed by Huawei to measure network energy efficiency was released as an official standard by ITU-T last year; after verifying this multi-dimensional energy efficiency indicator innovation in the live network, leading operators in China and Europe have achieved energy efficiency improvements ranging from 20% to 50%. This shows that the next generation of mobile communication technology can still achieve "More Bits, Less Watts" while the performance soars, and maintain green development.

Of course, the ultra-wide, green and intelligent future world is a super system project. It cannot be achieved by the single-handed advancement of one or several companies, nor is it the "family affair" of the ICT industry. Instead, it requires concerted efforts from all sectors of the industry to accelerate its progress from now on - as Li Peng called for, "time waits for no one, and action will soon arrive."