Huawei launches full series of 5.5G products and solutions at MWC 2024, accelerating carriers’ intelligent transformation

Huawei made a series of announcements at the Huawei Product & Solution Launch 2024 event during Mobile World Congress in Barcelona that highlight the company’s innovative drive and research and development (R&D) investments, as well as releasing a full range of 5.5G, F5.5G, and Net5.5G products and solutions for multiple scenarios. It is committed to working with global operators and industry partners to embrace challenges and opportunities and lead the future intelligent world.

 

Huawei Telecom Foundation Model accelerates carriers’ intelligent transformations

Yang Chaobin, Huawei’s board member and president of ICT Products & Solutions, started by announcing Huawei’s Telecom Foundation Model, a new technology that can accelerate the intelligent transformation of the ICT industry.

“Huawei Telecom Foundation Model provides role-based Copilots and scenario-based Agents to enable rich telecom applications and help operators empower employees and improve customer satisfaction,” he said.

Huawei also introduced the Autonomous Driving Network to reduce network energy consumption, improve network speeds and coverage through single-domain autonomy and cross-domain collaboration. In the 5.5G era, richer service scenarios require more differentiated experiences, but more complex technical architectures bring higher operations and maintenance (O&M) costs. The industry calls for new intelligent technologies to help carriers achieve optimal resource scheduling, driving end-to-end (E2E) O&M efficiency.

The Telecom Foundation Model supports accurate resource evaluation and service provisioning, offering optimal resource configuration. It also supports fast multi-objective optimisation to ensure deterministic user experiences and optimal network performance. It can also understand and break down complex processes and invoke various O&M tools to achieve efficient O&M closed-loop.

 

5.5G is now – it’s time to act

Cao Ming, president of Huawei Wireless Solution Product Line, emphasised that 2024 is the year of large-scale 5.5G commercial deployment globally. The 5.5G industry elements are fully ready for commercialisation and currently 5.5G commercialisation is accelerating globally.

Global operators have a multi-development-path to 5.5G: Huawei’s 5.5G GigaGreen series, with two outstanding features – GigaHz for X Giga Experience and Energy Saving by “0 bit 0 watt.” Huawei supports global operators for their multi-path 5.5G target networks with best performance with the least resources.  

The 5.5G GigaGreen series has been practised in multiple countries and regions with multiple operators, and has shown strong capability in terms of delivering the 5.5G ultimate experience with simplified sites, greatly reducing the power consumption and boosting traffic demand on live networks.

 

5.5G Intelligent Core Network Solution

George Gao, president of Huawei’s Cloud Core Network product line, followed this with information about Huawei’s 5.5G Intelligent Core Network Solution. 5G enables connectivity of everything. It has served billions of users, tens of millions of households, and thousands of industries. As 5G scales up, it is bringing more business value and entering more service scenarios. This, in turn, puts higher requirements on the network.

The 5.5G Intelligent Core Network Solution, as the first of its kind in the industry, contains four major parts, namely, N.I.D.U:

New Calling-Advanced: It transitions communication experiences from single-modal to multi-modal exchanges and helps operators reshape their business layout. Specifically, it introduces real-time voice-driven avatars to deliver more personalised experiences to individual users, and can also be used by enterprises as their virtual brand ambassadors.

Intelligent Personalised Experience (IPE): It breaks the bottlenecks, such as unevaluable experiences, non-dynamic optimisation, and non-closed-loop operations, helping operators add differentiated experience privileges to service packages and implement experience monetisation.

Digital Assistant & Digital Expert (DAE): It reshapes O&M from “experts+tools” to intelligence-centric “DAE+manual assistance”, improving O&M efficiency.

Intelligent UDG: It provides an E2E solution covering hardware and software to enable high-speed connections with single-flow rates increased from 1 Gbit/s to 10 Gbit/s.

 

Opening up a new era of F5.5G commercial use

Bob Chen, president of Huawei’s Optical Business product line, talked about opening up a new era of F5.5G commercial use as he announced Huawei’s latest optical products.

To boost further development of F5.5G, Bob Chen noted that operators need to build an F5.5G all-optical target network that supports “1+3+4” core features amid 10G ultra broadband development. That is, centered on ‘1’ network goal: 10Gbit/s ultra broadband; achieving ‘3’ network capabilities: 10Gbit/s ubiquitous access, metro network reducing latency to 1ms, and backbone network achieving 99.9999% availability; building ‘4’ network architectures: backbone network deploys 400G, 800G OTN to connect datacentres, metro network requires 100G to COs, access network uses 50G PON to homes and enterprises, and connects 10Gbit/s to a room.

For this target network, Huawei today launched three new F5.5G products: The industry’s first DC-oriented OTN - OSN 9800 K36, the industry’s first intelligent OLT - MA5800T, and the industry’s first FTTR+X product - iFTTR F50. The three innovative F5.5G products for backbone, access and home networks supports carriers evolving from the 1Gbps to the 10Gbps UBB era.

 

Making Net5.5G a reality, inspiring new growth

Leon Wang, president of Huawei’s Data Communication product line, explained that nowadays, immersive terminals and AI applications have seen an explosive growth, which brings huge opportunities to carriers. In the consumer market, immersive terminals are developing rapidly. In the enterprise market, AI’s innovation is faster than we can imagine.

Due to this, the industry agrees that networks need to continuously evolve to meet the changing requirements of terminals and applications. The fixed network oriented to the 5.5G era is called Net5.5G.

Huawei has launched four solutions tailored to Net5.5G, covering mobile backhaul, enterprise campus, converged transport, and a datacentre network to fully support the business success of carriers.

• Net5.5G mobile backhaul: Huawei’s base station routers provide the comprehensive access capabilities with 25/50/100/400GE to achieve network construction with optimal total cost of ownership (TCO). This solution is compatible with 4G, 5G and 5G-A transport, protecting investment. Leveraging the solution Network Digital Map provides industry-leading application-level experience visualisation and optimisation, achieving zero congestion for VIP services and accelerating user experience monetisation.
• Net5.5G high-quality 10 Gbit/s campus: Huawei has launched the world’s first all-scenario Wi-Fi 7 series products. It helps carriers improve their competitive edge and avoid homogenised competition through high-density access, video experience assurance and intelligent O&M with Network Digital Map, accelerating their transformation from internet service providers (ISPs) to managed service providers (MSPs).
• Net5.5G converged transport: Huawei provides high-density 400GE covering metro and core to carry numerous 10Gbit/s connections. Tenant-level slicing private lines, low-latency path selection, and application-level visualisation are used to implement network servitisation, accelerate network resource monetisation, and increase revenue.
• Net5.5G hyper-converged DCN: Huawei uses the high density 800GE datacentre network (DCN) to provide efficient computing power and plug-and-play, significantly reducing deployment time. The industry-leading NSLB algorithm increases the network throughput from 50% to 98% and improves the training efficiency by 20%.

Leon Wang wrapped up the launch with the parting words: “Huawei will work with industry partners to promote network evolution from conceptualisation to deployment, bring Net5.5G into reality, and inspire new growth for carriers.”

 

Building leading data infrastructure to unleash data value in the AI era

 

Peter Zhou, president of Huawei’s Data Storage product line, stated that the quantity and quality of data determines the power of AI. AI would be able to independently learn, understand, reason, innovate, and solve problems – just like us. The primary driving force behind achieving this is data.

He went on to announce the official release of the Huawei AI Data Lake Solution, All-Scenario Data Protection Solution, and DCS Full-Stack Data Center Solution.

Peter Zhou pointed to Huawei’s AI Data Lake Solution and talked up its ability to turn mass data into valuable assets and accelerate the AI service process. The solution is able to provide a unified storage resource pool with a high-performance layer and a high-capacity layer. It can also use data fabric to collect mass data across vendors, regions and systems. Next is a data tool chain that automatically converts data into insight. Finally, Data Lake has a management platform for enterprise-level global asset management and control.

 

ICT service and software enabling digital intelligence acceleration

Bruce Xun, president of Huawei’s Global ICT Technical Service, highlighted that for digital intelligence transformation, cognition is the core, digital is the cornerstone, and AI is the accelerator.

He stressed that AI technology can generate new value only when combined with cognition and digital. And digital intelligence transformation requires new technology and mode to resolve long-standing problems and bring tangible business value for customers.

He added that this will be achieved through a series of Huawei solutions, including Intelligent Connectivity Integration, Intelligent IT Integration, Intelligent Operations, SmartCare, Intelligent Digital Service and Huawei Learning.

 

Building the intelligent cloud foundation for telco with systematic innovation

Bruno Zhang, CTO of Huawei Cloud, mentioned that AI is becoming more and more important. Gartner predicts that by 2026, more than 80% of enterprises will use generative AI capabilities.

Bruno said that Huawei Cloud accelerates intelligence through systematic innovation. That means AI for Cloud and Cloud for AI. AI for Cloud is covered by Huawei Cloud’s Pangu models that power intelligent upgrades of industries and cloud applications.

Cloud for AI is where Huawei Cloud upgrades cloud services for AI, including distributed QingTian architecture, AI-native storage, data-AI convergence, and distributed cloud infrastructure, to be deployed and used across the cloud, network, edge and device.

Huawei Cloud’s GaussDB is a solid database that helps telcos process data both efficiently and securely. GaussDB is an enterprise-class distributed database with over 100,000 nodes. For availability, GaussDB ensures dual-cluster strong consistency with zero RPO. In terms of security, it is certified CC EAL4+, the highest level in the industry. And for automation, GaussDB provides one-stop tools to convert and migrate 95% of common syntax.

Huawei Cloud’s data-AI convergence platform is a robust data foundation for these models.

With LakeFormation, one copy of data can be shared without migration. DataArts Studio, makes the entire data governance process more intelligent, from data integration, development, to quality and asset management.

The three pipelines – DataArts, ModelArts, and CodeArts – orchestrate and schedule data and AI workflows to drive online model training and inference with real-time data.

 

Accelerating energy transition for green ICT

Fang Liangzhou, vice president of Huawei Digital Power, rounded off a day of stunning announcements by stating that operators need to transform from energy consumers to energy prosumers. He released the latest ‘Site Virtual Power Plant (VPP) Distributed Energy Storage System (DESS) Solution’ and ‘SmartDC, a Large-Scale Data Center Solution in the Intelligent Computing Era’.

Huawei site VPP solution is the industry’s first end-to-end solution, including the energy aggregation platform, intelligent gateways, and intelligent lithium batteries. It helps operators and tower vendors build simple, intelligent, and convergent site VPP systems to efficiently develop electric power services.

This intelligent computing era requires new datacentre facilities with higher reliability, higher density and larger size. To address this, Huawei announced its SmartDC, a large datacentre solution for the intelligent computing era, featuring a converged power system, distributed cooling system and prefabricated modular deployment for maximum efficiency.