Huawei Rotating Chairman Highlights Practices and Prospects of 5G in Digital Transformation for Industries at GSMA Thrive

During the recent virtual GSMA Thrive event hosted by GSMA, Huawei executives delivered keynote speeches, shedding light on how industries are leveraging 5G to embrace digital transformation in a faster and more efficient manner. The online event brought together industry leaders to discuss technologies like 5G, AI, IoT, and Digital Transformation and how they are influencing every part of our lives, society and businesses.

Huawei’s Rotating Chairman Guo Ping delivered a speech titled "5G in a post-pandemic world: Countdown to the digital blastoff". In this speech, Ping discussed the social value of ICT in combating COVID-19, as well as the practices and prospects of applying 5G in digital transformation for industries.

"With the help of 5G, industries are going digital at a faster pace. Next, we will work with our partners on industry applications to help our customers unleash the potential of 5G, generating the first round of dividends from major 5G applications," Ping said.

He pointed out that during the pandemic, the social value of ICT applications developed based on 5G, AI, cloud, and big data has been greater than ever.

Ping confirmed that Huawei will continuously support open and collaborative standards and industry organizations in their efforts to safeguard a unified global communications industry. Global collaboration is critical to successfully beating the virus, no matter whether it is in the medical or communications sector.

He also expressed his belief that ICT is extending to every industry on a large scale, becoming a key enabler of social development and generating multiple waves of technology dividends for all industries.

In another keynote speech entitled "5G Brings Five Opportunities with New Value", Mr. Gan Bin, Chief Marketing Officer for Huawei’s Wireless Network Solutions elaborated why 5G is the digital foundation of new infrastructure to upgrade connectivity, AI, cloud, computing, and industrial applications and inject new vitality into economic development.

"5G significantly improves the experience of connectivity, expanding 4G's people-centered connections with smartphones to a full range of scenarios that span not only smartphones, but also smart wearables and homes. This will add greater convenience to daily lives," Gan said.

5G eliminates data upload limitations, meaning that a massive amount of data can be transferred from hundreds of millions of devices to cloud servers to provide AI operations with tremendous data, which will greatly reduce the training period. It enables devices to make the best of the powerful computing in the cloud to relax requirements on local computing, reducing device costs. Furthermore, 5G enables the transfer of AI operation results to devices to greatly expand the availability of AI-based functionality.

Constrained by insufficient local capabilities, less than 2% of the nearly 40 ZB data generated in 2019 was saved. 5G stimulates the demand for huge storage worldwide, offering a new option to implement cloud storage to save the massive data.

Furthermore, limited by current technology, less than 10% of all data has been analyzed and applied so far. 5G stimulates the demand for enormous computing power, enabling devices to leverage powerful cloud computing capabilities anytime, anywhere.

"While 4G has changed lives, 5G is set to change society. 5G has proven an indispensable enabler for business digitalization and will greatly improve the operational efficiency across industries," Gan concluded.

For her part, Zhu Huimin, Director of Marketing Execution Dept of Huawei Wireless Network Product Line, delivered a keynote speech titled “AI for 5G — Network Automation Empowers the Intelligent 5G Era”.

Zhu noted that one of the most significant driving forces for future mobile service innovation and development is the automated operations capability of mobile networks based on AI.

Compared with 4G networks, 5G networks feature a qualitative leap in key performance indicators (KPIs), such as transmission rate, transmission delay, and connection scale. Therefore, 5G networks can support more diverse service scenarios and applications;

Zhu remarked that the key to achieving upgrade from these two aspects lies in AI for 5G. AI-powered network automation capabilities can spawn higher O&M efficiency, better network performance, and more agile service provisioning for 5G networks.

Global operators, equipment vendors, and third-party vendors have currently started to explore the application of AI technologies to mobile networks.

Zhu said that the road to intelligent autonomous networks will most likely not be easy, and it requires continuous collaboration between all industry parties. Huawei therefore proposes the "1+3+N" industry strategy in the wireless field and hopes to collaborate with operators as well as industry partners to ensure the ecosystem prospers, and to enable the Intelligent 5G era.

She stated that openness is the key to incubating and enabling more innovative services, and scenario-based APIs need to be built to enable intent-based E2E intelligent autonomous networks.

"As the two most important technologies in modern human society, 5G and AI promote and collaborate with each other. The AI-based automated operations capability of mobile networks is one of the most significant driving forces for future mobile service innovation and development," commented Zhu.