Huawei inspires growth through Net5.5G at MWC24

Leon Wang began the event by highlighting the importance of accelerating Net5.5G’s commercial use. There will be an explosive growth of new services and applications such as AR, MR, and AI which both create new opportunities for telcos but also demand new network requirements.

This, he said, would be true in both the consumer and enterprise segments and therefore, the industry will need more bandwidth and will need to upgrade to Net5.5G, the vendors new series of solutions.

In the consumer segment, Leon Wang spoke of new applications such as immersive XR terminals and AI that have rapidly developed with XR shipments forecast to surge and to introduce new capabilities. The latest terminals will need support for e.g. bandwidths reaching 800Mbps and latency of 20ms, to ensure a much more seamless user experience.

Meanwhile, in the enterprise sector, Leon Wang highlighted that AI is innovating beyond our imagination. He said Gartner forecasts show more than 80% of enterprises will adopt AI-generated content (AIGC) by 2026. For instance, in video production “Open AI’s Sora can generate content based on simple statements. Each video generation requires about 8 to 10 interactions”, increasing network traffic more than 10-fold.

He went on to discuss autonomous driving training. Here, substantial amounts of self-driving training data will need to be transmitted through the networks. “Some enterprises generate about 160TB data every day, which needs to be uploaded to the computing centre for model training. Agile, flexible, and inclusive access to networks has become a main requirement in the AI era.”

Looking at these service requirements, Leon Wang established that the networks of today won’t be able to meet the demands of such new services, naming bandwidth as one of the main culprits.

“According to Huawei's survey, the download rate of most of today's networks in the world is less than 100Mbps, and the percentage of 10GE access rings is less than 15%. Services such as XR are becoming more popular than ever, but today‘s network bandwidth cannot meet such traffic surge.”

He made similar arguments for the enterprise market. “Large bandwidth is expensive, while low bandwidth is not enough. Currently, the monthly cost of 10GE private lines exceeds $10,000 US dollars, and the bandwidth of 90% enterprise private lines is less than 1Gbps.

“Worst yet, traditional private lines cannot be flexibly adjusted based on service requirements. In the AI era, when enterprises generate massive data and need to transmit the data to the computing centre, their traditional private lines cannot match[cope].”

This is where Huawei’s series of Net5.5G solutions come to play. The goal is to future proof the network through evolution to meet the changing requirements of devices, terminals, and applications, and consists of four parts.

Firstly, there are four types of 10Gbps connections to support new applications, that is for mobile, home, enterprise campus, and for enterprise private line; then the bearer network to evolve to End-to-End 400GE converged transport network for faster network monetization; followed by upgraded data centres to 400GE or 800GE ports; and finally, network management to optimize and analyse the whole network through a network digital map.

In Net5.5G, the base station bandwidth is upgraded from 10GE to 25GE/50GE while the access layer is upgraded from 10GE to 100GE, with access capabilities of 25/50/100/400GE on demand. Traditional networks won’t be able to support this but Net5.5G mobile backhaul is compatible with 4G, 5G, and 5.5G ensuring “smooth evolution and protecting investments”.

User experience also impacts revenue. For instance, in South Africa, there is a lot of network packet loss. Leon Wang argued that as a result, bit rates and user experiences can be poor, despite manual adjustments done by the operators. This causes revenue losses. But the deployment of the Huawei network digital map optimizes the service paths and quality in real time.

Further, Leon Wang said many fixed players can service their enterprise customers through differentiated services. Firstly, more bandwidth and user-concurrency through Wi-Fi7. Secondly, through lossless multi-GE switches as well as hyper-converged gateways operators can ensure no audio or video freezing. Third, a cloud platform-based LAN and WAN convergence solution greatly simplifies O&M.

In the transport network, investment pressures drive network convergence to optimize total cost of ownership. Converged and full-services networks drive improved monetization and give operators a competitive advantage.

Leon Wang spoke of leading operators providing private network-level service assurance services for industry customers. “[…] many carriers use hybrid networks of multiple vendors, which makes it difficult to deploy end-to-end slicing. Huawei's unique soft and hard dual-mode slicing solution can interconnect with other vendors and manage third-party devices. This greatly helps carriers deploy slice-based private lines.”

In data centre networks, Huawei believes that computing power leasing services are the next operator trends. “Besides IDC equipment rooms and servers, operators also can provide computing power leasing services. In fact, some leading carriers have started to build large-scale computing power centres and provide computing power leasing services. The ROI is less than 2.5 years.”

Huawei’s hyper-converged data center network solution helps operators to quickly build large-scale computing power centres. Leon Wang listed three unique benefits of this product.

Firstly, the plug-and-play function “improves the efficiency by 10 times compared with the traditional mode.” Secondly, the Huawei NSLB algorithm can increase the network throughput from 50% to 98% while improving the efficiency of AI model training by 20%. Finally, the unified O&M enables minute-level fault locating on the compute and storage network, reduces the waiting time for computing power and protect customers' investment, through the network digital map.

In response to a question about how the full series of Net5.5G solutions and products support the business success of operators Leon Wang stressed they can support ultra-broadband applications that require full barrier networks.

He further argued that we need the network for autonomous driving ability, and therefore enterprise customers. In the enterprise market, the costs are higher than the costs that integrators have. But with Net5.5G, combined with Wi-Fi 7, application assurance operators can help them provide a better service.

“Net5.5G is good for operators, and the early adopters will have an advantage.”