Zero Wait, LTE Evolution towards 5G Wins the Future

Huawei delivered a keynote speech at the 2018 AfricaCom on how to build a fully connected Africa. The speech title was "Zero wait, LTE evolution towards 5G wins the future." Huawei is committed to bringing full connectivity values to Africa in most innovative and economical fashion.

Over the last decade, the company has been actively engaging global carriers and connectivity stakeholders to develop a mature LTE ecosystem, improve user experience, and facilitate application innovation. A collaborative environment orchestrated by governments is needed to roll out favorable policies and regulations so that societies can benefit more from wireless broadband, and seize opportunities for new growth in Africa transitioning to 5G.

Africa is seeing faster population growth than the rest of the world and over half of the people across the continent aged under 25. Such rapid increase and demographic structure suggest huge potential. The MBB penetration rate in Africa is only 42.7%, while 4G penetration rate is merely 6.1%. 403 million population are still unconnected. These numbers indicate enormous room for growth for ICT infrastructure.

Walter Wang, President of Huawei Wireless Network Marketing and Solution Sales, remarked during his speech that 4G LTE is still the primary choice for the globe before 2025, when it comes to the radio access technology options among 2G, 3G, 4G LTE and 5G NR. Every LTE investment is a 5G investment.

Huawei Delivered a Keynote “Zero Wait, LTE Evolution towards 5G Wins the Future” at AfricaCom 2018

"Zero Wait, LTE Evolution towards 5G Wins the Future," said Walter Wang. "Huawei has successfully deployed 5G technologies on 4G networks. This not only optimizes the investment structure, but also facilitates operators in achieving optimal LTE evolution. Such solutions aim to help African operators in addressing capacity challenges, including sectorization, Massive MIMO, site densification, and optimum spectrum utilization. In addition, the introduction of Huawei CloudAIR 2.0 will support flexible demand-based spectrum allocation between GSM, UMTS, LTE, and 5G NR increasing spectral efficiency and reducing operation cost."

LTE Evolution with Gbps experience can give rise to WTTx, NB-IoT, and video services, facilitate business growth, and speed up investment return.

Walter Wang also introduced Huawei's 5G progress. Huawei has been actively engaged in providing innovative solutions, such as 3D-shaping and uplink and downlink decoupling, to tackle challenges in 5G deployment. Huawei has also released end-to-end commercial products covering wireless networks, core networks, bearer networks, and terminals in preparation for commercial 5G. To date, Huawei has signed more than 20 commercial 5G contracts with operators from Europe, Middle East and East Asia. There has been over 10,000 sites of 5G equipment in shipment for those operators.

Huawei advocates concerted efforts among governments, telecom regulators, investment institutions, operators, equipment vendors, and vertical industry partners to promote rapid LTE deployment across Africa. The aim is to bridge the digital divide, and build a fully connected Africa.

Huawei CloudAIR Solution Awarded as ‘Innovative Network Solution of the Year for Connectivity’ at IMC 2018

Huawei’s CloudAIR solution was awarded by the "Innovative Network Solution of the Year for connectivity", presented by The Ministry of Communications (MoC, India) and Cellular Operators Association of India (COAI).

This is in high recognition of Huawei's efforts to address the challenges facing air interface resources on mobile broadband networks. CloudAIR uses cloud technologies to centrally schedule and efficiently utilize air interface resources, enabling operators to optimize resource utilization, unleash network potential, and deliver an overall better user experience.

Huawei’s CloudAIR solution was awarded by the "Innovative Network Solution of the Year for connectivity" at IMC 2018

India boasts a large communications market with 1.1 billion mobile network subscribers. As the Indian government continuously promotes a "Digital India" project, its nationwide terminal penetration rate is on the rise. In addition, reduced tariffs as a result of fierce industry competition also contribute to the rapid development of data services. Video, social media, e-commerce, and many other services have successfully permeated into every facet of people's lives.

On the other hand, the number of existing 2G/3G subscribers remains high while 4G services are in full swing. Indian operators are in urgent need of getting more spectrum resources and expanding bandwidth. However, the spectrum resources are so expensive and scarce that operators find it rather challenging to increase revenue while slashing the cost of operation.

Huawei's CloudAIR multi-RAT spectrum sharing solution can introduce an efficient method to address the spectrum challenges faced by current operators. In addition to guaranteeing the experience of GSM and UMTS users on the network, the solution is also capable of coordinating spectrum resources for LTE users, facilitating the introduction of LTE technologies. It not only helps slash the spectrum cost by over US$ 100 million and the site addition requirement by 20%–30%, but also enhances user experience of data services and increases service revenue.

CloudAIR has been deployed by a number of operators in multiple states throughout India and will be promoted to more cities and suburbs. It is believed to be an ideal answer to the high spectrum and bandwidth requirements brought by a sudden upsurge in LTE services. Up till now, the CloudAIR solution has been commercially applied on more than 80 networks worldwide, with the number of deployments expected to exceed 100 by the end of 2018.