Tantra Analyst

After a few years of a lull because of COVID-19, the Huawei Analyst Summit was in-person this year. As usual, it was in Shenzhen from April 17^th to April 19th, attended by many prominent analysts worldwide, but only a select few from the USA. The event’s highlight was 5.5G, Huawei’s name/brand for the next phase of 5G. The company went over the board to show that 5.5G is not just a vision but the real deal.

Apart from the keynotes and sessions, the event’s highlight was the tour of China Unicom’s Innovation Center in the industrial province of Guangzhou. During the tour, Unicom executives illustrated their groundbreaking work with Huawei in developing and deploying many realistic use cases of 5.5G.

Regarding the next phase of 5G, it doesn’t take too much to understand how far ahead Huawei and Chinese operators are compared to their cohorts in the US, Europe, and other regions. At the same time, questions remain on how all the restrictions put on Huawei regarding access to semiconductor technologies will affect their lead. However, those restrictions didn’t affect Huawei’s share in 2023 global infrastructure revenues.

What is “5.5G?”

Naming the phases of cellular standards has always been a fun but confusing exercise. 3GPP, the standards body, comes up with the official “marketing name” for specific sets of releases. But, vendors and operators take liberty in spinning their own names and definitions. This practice gets particularly abusive in the in-between phases. For example, LTE Advanced, a 3GPP name, had many alternatives, such as 4.5G, 4G Advanced, Pre-5G, and Evolved 5G. And it seems the story will be repeated for the next phase of 5G. 3GPP calls the Releases 18 and beyond 5G Advanced. However, Huawei and some of its friendly operators are calling it 5.5G. Even more confusing is that the features included in 5G Advanced and 5.5G are similar but not the same. If so, then what exactly is 5.5G?

5.5G is the vision to take the performance and usability of 5G to the next level without being beholden to any specific 3GPP releases. As defined by Huawei, 5.5G is a heterogeneous mix of standard and product features. It includes things like Red-Cap (Rel.17), passive IoT (Rel.18), utilizing all bands (from 900 MHz to mmWave), improvements such as Giga MIMO, beamforming, and Extremely Large Antenna Arrays (ELAA), as well as using AI for better O&M and optimization, etc. it can provide up to 10 Gbps downlink and up to 1 Gbps uplink speeds, higher capacity, lower latency, and power consumption while supporting next-gen applications, services, and use cases.

MWC 2024 was Huawei’s coming out party for 5.5G. At the analyst summit, the objective was to show progress on the ground and explain what’s on the horizon.  

Highlights of the event

The event was spread into three days. The first day was full of keynotes and a couple of AI sessions. The second day had several overlapping breakout sessions for networking, cloud, data center, etc. I focused mainly on the network track and couldn’t attend others. The third day was all about tours and live demos. I chose Huawei 5.5G Park and China Unicom Guangzhou Innovation Center tours.

Keynotes

The keynotes were delivered by Zhou Hong, Huawei Strategy Research Institute’s President, and Eric Xu, Deputy Chairman and Rotating Chairman of Huawei. As one would expect, the keynotes were all about the grand vision of how AI will change the world and the role Huawei will play in it. Eric talked about 5.5G, Harmony OS strategy, Self-driving opportunities, energy generation, and more.

For Harmony OS, Huawei’s initial focus is on building a solid ecosystem in China with more than 5,000 local developers and later expanding to international markets.

Huawei is developing its own pre-trained Chinese NLP model, Pangu, and plans to use it across industries along with its Ascend cloud services and Kunpeng (Arm-based) silicon platform.

Specifically, regarding AI in telecom, the current focus is on simplifying network management and optimization. Huawei’s vision is to fully automate managing telecom networks through four levels, akin to autonomous driving levels. You can get a glimpse of the keynote here.

AI for RAN session

In the AI for RAN session, Eric Zhou, VP and CMO of Huawei Wireless Solutions, introduced three critical elements of their AI strategy:

1) Telecom Foundational AI model for network policy analysis and decision-making

 – Huawei will offer the models to operators and even allow them to tune it to their needs

2) RAN Intelligent Agents – For O&M, Network Optimization and Provisioning

 – O&M Agent minimizes human intervention, allows faster troubleshooting, and automates tasks to improve productivity and efficiency of operations

 – Network Optimization Agent optimizes the network across many dimensions, such as user experience, performance, energy efficiency, and many others, which is magnitudes better than today’s single-dimensional optimization.

 – Provisioning Agent enables high precision SLA visualization, zero-touch, agile provisioning, and fast time to market for new features, etc.

3) RAN Digital Twin System

1. As the name suggests, this is building a complete high-accuracy digital twin of the network so that all the changes, updates, and new features can be thoroughly tested and optimized before deployment in the actual network. This will allow quick deployment and minimize post-upgrade issues.

All these are part of Huawei’s 5.5G vision.

5.5G Readiness, BTS, Small cells, Spectrum and Antenna Sessions

Huawei and their Chinese operator partners made a heavy pitch that the market is ready for 5.5G: China Mobile has publicly announced the 5.5G upgrade for 300 cities; Other Chinese operators, China Unicom and China Telecom, have also committed to 5.5G; STC in Saudi Arabia, du in UAE and some other operators in Europe have committed to 5.5G as well. Just to be sure, some of these have announced 5G Advanced commitments, which Huawei is counting as 5.5G. From an infrastructure readiness point of view, Huawei has commercialized many features of 5.5G. There are already enough RedCap chipset vendors and devices in the market. More importantly, Huawei claims applications, services, and business cases are ready to utilize 5.5G and monetization opportunities for operators.

Huawei product folks talked about how their popular Meta AAU baste station products are ready for 5.5G, supporting some of the initial features and the vision of 5.5G. The indoor session showcased their strong product folio with examples of large-scale deployments. They also illustrated interesting use cases, such as small cells in parking garages, autonomous parking, and the summoning of self-driving cars. The antennas session discussed PoC for digital antennas, whose propagation pattern, gain,  azimuth, and tilt can be changed remotely.

5.5G Park and China Unicom Guangzhou Tour

Huawei took a bunch of analysts to their office in Shenzhen, which has a live over-the-air 5.5G test network. They showed demos of autonomous vehicle, Giga MIMO, Passive IoT, mmWave, RedCap, FWA use cases, and others.

But the most impressive was the tour of the innovation center of China Unicom Guangzhou branch. Guangzhou is one of the most industrialized provinces in the country, accounting for 10% of overall Unicom subscriptions and revenue. Huawei claimed that Unicom Guangzhou is at the forefront of 5.5G commercialization. So, developments here are at scale and matter for the entire network. They have an extensive 5G SA network and sizable RedCap development, with 127,000 sites providing the whole region, and offer more than 20 modules and terminals.

Being the country’s Industrial base, Guangzhou has no dearth of applications, services, and use cases, spanning consumer, enterprise, and industrial segments. The same applies to private networks. Huawei and Unicom have deployed private networks in many factories, warehouses, ports, etc.

One interesting and highly successful use case Unicom highlighted was providing guaranteed high-quality connectivity to online influencers/streamers at a higher price. Influencer streaming is extremely popular and has become a major e-commerce platform in China. Unicom even uses network slicing to ensure quality for these subscribers. Unicom also talked about other commercialized industrial, home/enterprise connectivity, and edge services that will use the capabilities of 5.5G and provide monetization opportunities for operators.

A unique use case I haven’t seen before was using 5G for the command and control system for Drones, which Unicom calls Low-Altitude Network. It manages 9,100 Sq.km of coverage area with more than 300 Drone hangers.

Tantra’s Take

There are differing views on whether China and Huawei are behind at par or ahead of the USA in 5G and its evolution. There is also the notion that all the latest technology is being developed in the western hemisphere, and China is ahead only because of the enormous size of its network. But based on the discussions at HAS24, especially the things that China Unicom had already commercialized and has in its pipeline, for the next phase of 5G, there wouldn’t be any question on how far ahead Chinese operators are compared to their US and European counterparts.

In my view, the 5.5G naming is confusing. I didn’t get a clear answer as to whether 5.5G is a B2B name or will also be extended to end consumers. Since 3GPP already has 5G Advanced branding, and there is no one-to-one mapping with 5.5G, confusion between the two is inevitable. For example, when services are launched, it’s unclear whether the devices will display “5GA” or “5.5G.” It might vary between operators and regions, further confusing everybody.

The primary objective of the next phase of 5G, whatever you call it, is services beyond simple smartphone-based broadband—taking 5G connectivity to IoT, enterprises, industrial applications, drones, private networks, and much more. To win in this phase, there are three primary requirements: 1) Market demand; 2) Infrastructure to service that demand; and 3) Technological capability. Let’s examine where the operators and vendors in the USA and EU stand relative to the Chinese operators and Huawei.

Looking at the market requirements, there has to be enough demand, with attractive monetization opportunities, for the services enabled by this phase. These include cases that utilize extreme speeds, lower latency, and features like RedCap, network slicing, etc. The need has to be large enough and on a network-wide basis. And there have to be viable business models to make the investment worthwhile. Currently, this is a major challenge for the operators in the US, EU, and other developed markets. However, in China, because of the large industrial base, much higher digitization of the economy, and higher affinity of consumers to use the latest technology, there is a natural demand for the services the next phase of 5G will offer.

Regarding Infrastructure requirements, 5G deployed in Sub-6GHz bands (for ubiquitous coverage) and sufficient spectrum/capacity are a must to realize almost anything the next phase of 5G offers. Additionally, 5G Stand Alone (SA) is key to support things like RedCap and Network Slicing. Most 5G networks in the western hemisphere are Non-Stand Alone. Operators in the USA have enough spectrum, but the ones in Europe don’t. The 5G footprint in Europe is pretty limited. On the contrary, most of the 5G networks in China are 5G SA. All Chinese operators have a good amount of spectrum.

Technology-wise, it was pretty clear from the event that Huawei seem to have the network technology to bring the next phase of 5G to fruition. There is a healthy ecosystem of devices and apps/services vendors to bring the 5.5 vision to life.

However, the questions remain about Huawei’s access to the latest semiconductor technology and supply chain. All the vision Huawei painted relies heavily on a sound semiconductor ecosystem. Interestingly, that subject was not discussed during the event. To Huawei’s defense, despite tough US sanctions, the company managed to slightly increase its global infrastructure revenue share in 2023. It would be interesting to observe how the company will fare with these restrictions, which are expected to be in place for an extended period.

Prakash Sangam is the founder and principal at Tantra Analyst, a leading boutique research and advisory firm. He is a recognized expert in 5G, Wi-Fi, AI, Cloud and IoT. To read articles like this and get an up-to-date analysis of the latest mobile and tech industry news, sign-up for our monthly newsletter at TantraAnalyst.com/Newsletter, or listen to our Tantra’s Mantra podcast.