Huawei unveils eight ‘5.5G’ innovation practices for operators

During MWC 2024, Huawei also unveiled its ‘5.5G’ intelligent core network solution Chinese vendor Huawei recently unveiled eight “5.5G”, or 5G-Advanced innovation practices to help operators build such networks. The announcement was made during MWC 2024, which took place last week in Barcelona, Spain. “As all industry elements are ready, we have entered the first year of ‘5.5G’ commercialization. Huawei’s full series of ‘5.5G’ products and solutions help operators from around the world to achieve multipath ‘5.5G’ evolution across all bands,” said Cao Ming, president of Huawei Wireless Solutions. The executive also remarked that after three years of rapid development, “5.5G” has progressed from vision to reality, adding that all of the standards, services, products, devices, businesses and policies are ready. “The first year of commercial use of ‘5.5G’ has officially arrived, and the commercial rollout of ‘5.5G’ is accelerating worldwide. While Middle Eastern operators have achieved scaled ‘5.5G’ commercialization, operators across Europe, Asia Pacific and Latin America are verifying 10 Gbps, preparing for ‘5.5G’ commercialization in 2024,” Cao said. According to the Chinese vendor, all spectrum bands are shifting to 5G, meaning that 5G-Advanced will use converged TDD and FDD networking. “All operators are poised to evolve to ‘5.5G’, but from different paths. Based on the core sub-6 GHz bands, operators build ‘5.5G’ networks for ubiquitous 5 Gbps. Meanwhile, based on mmWave and upper 6 GHz (U6G) bands, operators deliver 10 Gbps at hotspots for 5.5G,” said Huawei. Huawei noted that in order to facilitate multipath evolution to 5.5G across all bands, it provides 5.5G GigaGreen full-series products and solutions, which are in the vendor’s words, “Native Giga” with ultra-wideband and multi-antenna technologies, to improve performance by 10 times. The vendor also noted that these products and solutions also are “native green” from architecture to hardware and software to support the “0 Bit 0 Watt” concept. Huawei’s eight practices for the ‘5.5G’ field cover key technology areas, including antenna evolutions, mmWave bandwidth, network intelligence in the RAN and energy efficiency. During MWC 2024, Huawei also unveiled its ‘5.5G’ intelligent core network solution. The vendor held a launch event, where George Gao, president of Huawei’s Cloud Core Network Product Line, released the ‘5.5G’ intelligent core network solution and stated that 2024 is the first year for commercialization of ‘5.5G’, with the ‘5.5G’ intelligent core network, as an important part of ‘5.5G’, incorporating service intelligence, network intelligence, and O&M intelligence. During the event, the executive also noted that “New Calling” technology was put into commercial use for serving up to 50 million subscribers across 31 provinces in China last year. The technology has also been verified in Europe, Latin America, the Middle East and Asia Pacific, and is set to be commercialized in these regions in during this year, he added. Huawei believes that previous investments made by operators to deploy 5G network infrastructure will be protected with the future launch of 5G-Advanced. Huawei’s president of wireless solution, Cao Ming, previously said during a media roundtable at Huawei’s 14th Global Mobile Broadband Forum (MBBF), held In October 2023 in Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates. The executive said that 5G-Advanced networks will not require large investments by operators in new network architecture and will be launched using 5G Standalone (SA) networks. He also said that Huawei is working with its partners to make sure that future ‘5.5G’ applications, devices and services will be fully compatible with current 5G networks.