5.5G is a key milestone on the path to an intelligent world – Huawei

The Striding Towards an Intelligent World Summit at HUAWEI CONNECT 2022 was a success. At this summit, David Wang, Huawei’s Executive Director of the Board and Chairman of the ICT Infrastructure Managing Board, gave a keynote speech titled “Embracing the 5.5G Era: Striding Towards the Intelligent World.”

5.5G is a key milestone on our path to an intelligent world, he said in his speech, and he released Huawei’s latest series of white papers on the subject. Wang also urged the ICT industry to collaborate on eight aspects of this vision. Working together to further define and refine the industry vision and standards for the 5.5G era will accelerate the industry’s transition to the 5.5G era and the intelligent world.

Individuals, households, and industries will have higher expectations for digital infrastructure in the future.

Immersive services such as XR and holographic communication are maturing for individuals, and connectivity experience is expected to increase from 1 Gbit/s to 10 Gbit/s. Mobile DOU will increase from 15 GB to 100 GB. Latency and ubiquitous connectivity requirements will also rise.

Demands for advanced services such as 24K 3D VR games and holographic education and meetings are ushering in a full-fiber, 10 Gbit/s era for households.

Digital transformation has now entered the fast lane for industries. Industrial-grade applications such as smart manufacturing and power grid dispatching are driving up diverse connectivity, quality, and sensing requirements, while also driving explosive growth in computing power and storage demand.

Wang noted, “We must continue to work hard if we hope to reach an intelligent world. The 5.5G era is an important milestone on this path – one we cannot miss. In the 5.5G era, we will need ubiquitous 10 Gbit/s experience; intelligent and high-quality compute scheduling; highly autonomous L4 networks; Cloud Native 2.0 services for enterprises, and a 10-fold increase of computing effectiveness, storage, and infrastructure energy efficiency.”

He went on to highlight Huawei’s belief that it will need the support of customers, ecosystem partners, industry organizations, and academic institutions to continue evolving and reinforcing digital infrastructure, thereby accelerating the advent of the 5.5G era and intelligent world.

More specifically, he said that industry players would have to come together to:

1. Promote the allocation of more spectrum to accelerate industry development and continue exploring new 5.5G use cases with greater commercial value
2. Define the technical paths forward and standards for F5.5G
3. Quickly reach a consensus on evolution towards Net5.5G
4. Define a profile for L4/L5 autonomous networks and promote unified standards
5. Build an open and diversified computing industry for shared success and redefine the computing architecture
6. Define a storage architecture that meets diversified data processing requirements
7. Build a cloud foundation for the intelligent world and cultivate a stronger cloud service industry ecosystem
8. Adopt a unified NCIe system to help industry save energy and reduce emissions with innovative ICT technologies and solutions.

Wang also released Huawei’s latest series of white papers, which are titled Striding Towards the Intelligent World. Guided by the next steps relating to the eight facets mentioned above, these white papers explore both the opportunities and challenges that will be presented to major ICT infrastructure domains by emerging business needs and technological developments. The white papers also outline key trends in these domains and specify actions that the company recommends the industry should take before 2025.

Huawei’s Chief Strategy Architect Dang Wenshuan then took the stage to discuss the contents of the white papers in more detail. He emphasized two concepts the company would like to promote as we move towards 5.5G and eventually the intelligent world:

1. “ICT for Intelligence” which focuses on constant innovation and evolution in different ICT domains to improve key capabilities, and
2. “Intelligence for ICT” which focuses on the intelligent and architectural innovation within the ICT industry itself that will be needed to address challenges like increasingly complex O&M, ensuring user experience in diversified service scenarios, and green development. Addressing these challenges will help us make the most of existing and coming core ICT capabilities and lead us to the intelligent world faster.