Technical Innovation Accelerate Connecting the Unconnected, Says Huawei’s Ritchie Peng
PARTNER FEATURE: At Huawei Products and Solutions Launch in London, Ritchie Peng, Chief Marketing Officer of Huawei Wireless Network, delivered a keynote speech titled “Technical Innovation Accelerate Connecting the Unconnected”. In the past three decades, a new generation of wireless communications technology has emerged every 10 years, with each one approximately 10,000 times powerful in comparison to its earlier generation. Mobile users have entered into the Gbps era, but Digital gaps still remains. According to statistics, 750 million people worldwide do not have MBB coverage, and 50% of the population does not access to the Internet. Even in Western Europe, 50% of buildings is still under low coverage. “As a technology company, Huawei has always been committed to launch leading & technological innovative solutions to bring wireless connection to unconnected rural areas, homes and buildings,” said Peng.
RuralStar, Connect the Unconnected Rural Areas
“Huawei’s long-term focus on rural network solution innovation enables mobile network services to reach remote areas in emerging markets. Huawei RuralStar offers an effective and also economical solution for this market,” said Peng. Since 2017, Huawei RuralStar and RuralStar Lite series products have been introduced to over 50 countries, providing voice and high-speed network services for 40 million rural residents.
At the launch, Peng unveiled RuralStar Pro, a new solution to provide voice and mobile broadband services for villages with fewer than 500 people. The product comes with high integration, with baseband, RF, and wireless backhaul integrated in just a small package. It greatly reduces site power consumption by 55%, with two solar panels enough to power up the entire site. The site weight is reduced by 90% compared to traditional tower site, greatly reducing civil engineering and making delivery efficient. RuralStar Pro is cost-efficient in that devices are designed to the utmost simplicity and infrastructure cost is minimized. It takes only three to five years to see ROI even in small villages. The solution also offers effective means to livelihood services such as distance education, inclusive finance, and telemedicine.
WTTx, Connect the Unconnected Homes
WTTx (Wireless Home Broadband, also known as fixed wireless access in the industry) is an area where the mobile market has developed rapidly in recent years. Back in the 4G era, Huawei has the innovative WTTx solution to provide the “last mile” access on traditional fixed networks in urban and rural areas. The solution reduces the connection cost by 75% and shortens the deployment period by 90%. By December 2019, there have been over 100 million WTTx connections globally, creating new business opportunities for telecom operators and greatly improving the home broadband penetration rate in Mongolia, Sri Lanka, and the Philippines. 5G WTTx is an enhancement to the 4G counterpart, enabling 50–100 Mbps network services for homes without fixed fiber links. “We are confident that, by 2025, WTTx users will increase five-fold to 500 million,” said Peng.
Huawei innovative Massive MIMO solution and high-performance CPE coordination maximizes spectrum efficiency. Compared with MBB, it can increase spectrum efficiency by 3-5 times, which significantly reduces the cost of home broadband services with wireless network. The cost per GB compared to MBB will be reduced to 1 / 4 ~ 1/10. Huawei’s latest CPE is lightweight and easy to install. It supports wall-hanging installation method and pole-holding installation method without fear of sunlight and rain. This outdoor CPE can connect to the indoor unit through the niche window gap using a strip-cable with the need of a hole on the wall eliminated, which can solves the important problem of waiting for professional service personnel to install, expensive and time-consuming.
DIS, Connect the Unconnected Buildings
In the initial stages of 5G construction, indoor wireless coverage is a key factor to the process. Over 70% of global mobile broadband traffic is generated indoors, and the indoor traffic growth rate is twice that in comparison to outdoor scenarios, with this proportion still growing. Additionally, more than 70% of new 5G services, such as cloud VR, smart manufacturing, and telemedicine, occur indoors, meaning that indoor digitalization will become more important than ever.
Legacy components such as combiners and power splitters do not support new frequency bands of 5G, making MIMO unfeasible simply by installing extra feeders and antennas. This means that operators cannot evolve from a traditional distributed antenna system (DAS) to 5G. Huawei’s innovative distributed indoor system (DIS) revolutionizes the traditional DAS architecture by introducing active digital headends and supporting optical/electrical hybrid cables to facilitate network evolution, quick capacity expansion, and remote operation. Huawei has launched a series of solutions to fit different indoor scenarios. Even at the early stages of 5G, network operators can leverage such solutions to efficiently build indoor networks at the same pace with outdoor networks, thereby delivering a consistent user experience. By the end of 2019, Huawei 5G LampSite had been adopted by nearly 40 operators in 28 countries.
At the end, Peng remarked, “Technology must be universal. Through technical innovation solutions to accelerate connection the unconnected, we firmly believe that digital technology will benefit everyone, every family, every organization.”