日本語
Mobile World Congress Shanghai was busy, with more than 40,000 attendees from a record 124 countries. Over the years, it has grown to become much more than a local event. Today, it’s where the world gathers to understand the important developments happening across the region.
Monetizing 5G-Advanced and Artificial Intelligence (AI) were major themes this year.
At the event, the “A” in 5G-A was being used to reference the intertwining of Advanced and AI. Boosted by strong government support, 5G is already widely deployed in China. From this standpoint, China leads the rest of the globe. Now, it is doubling down on its pioneer status as it turns attention to 5G-A deployments. For what it’s worth, there was little conversation about 6G in the MWC Shanghai halls.
The consumer market was discussed frequently, with attendees reflecting on the impending magnitude of AI-generated video content being created on the fly, what it will mean for networks, and how to monetize it.
During the last day, the show floor remained abuzz, where attendees had a chance to see the latest on display from device electronics companies, and a well-received new high-design vehicle that provided full network connectivity between car and home for a seamless digital extension of the consumer lifestyle.
Here are the top takeaways that grabbed my attention at this year’s MWC Shanghai.
The year of 5G-Advanced
5G-Advanced was visible everywhere at the show thanks to its high priority in China and the 3GPP R18 standard being frozen a few days prior.
China is playing a leading role in 5G-A deployment, with China Mobile planning rollouts in 300 cities within the year. The Middle East is keen to be a fast follower, while North America and Europe are two years behind.
New business cases are being created based on 5G-A’s network capabilities and supported devices. China plans to use 5G-A to unlock new revenue streams from mMTC (Massive Machine-Type Communications) and uRLLC (Ultra-Reliable Low Latency Communications) capabilities. To date, 98% of 5G revenues are attributed to eMBB (Enhanced Mobile Broadband).
China’s business focus is on:
The emerging low-altitude economy
Integrating AI and communications
Extended reality (XR) services and mass adoption
AI-generated video content
Self-driving vehicles
Deterministic network experiences tailored to end user demand (e.g., stable low latency)
Let’s dive deeper into some of the key areas we believe will move the needle from a monetization perspective.
Low-altitude economy
As China opens the airspace below 3,000 meters, this low-altitude economy is becoming a strategic, emerging industry for the China government given lower costs, ubiquitous connectivity, and ability to become a quick revenue generator. It will comprise drones, electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) aircraft, and piloted vehicles for transportation, logistics, and tourism. This airspace has applications across industry, consumer services, military, and emergency services, such as medical supply deliveries, goods deliveries from e-commerce companies like Alibaba, and food deliveries. By 2030, China’s drone industry is expected to have a market size of $300 billion.
5G-A is essential to the low-altitude economy because it provides the throughput and data link capacity needed by high-definition video, plus 5G antennas to accurately monitor non-line-of-sight drone navigation and track drone trajectories.
Integrating AI and communications
There were three dominant AI themes in Shanghai: AI for Networks, Networks for AI, and large language models (LLMs) for enterprises.
AI for Networks incorporates AI capabilities into communications, such as using AI in human machine collaboration (co-pilots) and machine-machine collaboration (agents) to deliver intelligent business operations, intelligent and simplified operations and maintenance, and intelligent performance optimization.
China Mobile indicated this approach was already automatically identifying 60% of network issues and self-healing for 40% of them.
Singtel shared it is monetizing AI via personalized product recommendations and target advertising, experiencing a 25% uplift in insurance sales using AI to target customers.
Networks for AI brings together communications and compute to generate new telco revenues in which the telco delivers secure sovereign AI and private AI solutions. This could be the killer use case for 5G-A coupled with high-speed Ethernet transport networks.
Network performance is a critical component of the AI architecture. High performance is essential for AI compute that is distributed across central locations or large data centers for foundational models; regional locations for domain-specific models; edge locations for low latency inferencing and devices for small language models; and ultra-low latency inferencing.
Operator wireline and wireless networks become pivotal for meeting the high-performing (lossless, low latency) and secure wireless/wireline network requirements of distributed AI.
Versatile LLM for enterprises was another theme of the show, with operators demonstrating new revenue opportunities by providing and servicing AI LLMs tailored to verticals such as government, manufacturing, energy, healthcare, hospitality, and entertainment. Chinese operators propose to “service all your AI needs,” providing a go-to option AI infrastructure and AI solutions.
Operators are uniquely positioned for that use case since they already have data centers, connectivity, and over-the-air networks to bring AI to the edge and device.
Learn more about AI in Spirent’s Bracing for Impact: How AI Will Transform Digital Industries eBook and our new Testing the AI Fabric infographic.
AR for the masses gets closer
While augmented reality (AR) hype was put on the back burner a bit in favor of AI, AR for the mass market was nevertheless a hot topic in Shanghai.
XREAL's consumer-grade glasses took a decisive step towards mainstream adoption. They look like normal glasses but with wearable displays with speakers which need to be tethered to a smart device. These glasses don't offer the full, mixed reality like Apple Vision Pro or Meta Quest 3, but the sheer normality and utility offer an acceptable level of augmented reality for the masses that can deliver relevant use cases for both industry and consumers.
The challenge remains the tethered device and the need for a reliable high-performance, high-capacity network. The introduction of 5G-A provides a key set of capabilities to unlock the performance of AR and XR devices. Qualcomm had noticeable activity with China Mobile around 5G-A mmWave and with China Unicom for 5G-A mmWave and sub-6 GHz carrier aggregation.
The 5G-A mmWave connection is expected to reach a latency of less than 10 milliseconds in a space of nearly 1,000 square meters. That kind of responsiveness allows for smooth XR experiences including backpack-free, cable-free, and multi-user competitive gaming in a large space. Carrier aggregation of 800 MHz bandwidth in the 26 GHz high-frequency band and 100 MHz bandwidth in the 3.5 GHz low band offer an incredible peak downlink speed of more than 8.5 Gbps.
What’s next
As the event wrapped, it was clear 5G-Advanced and AI are indeed intertwined in the new connectivity-based economies being build throughout China and beyond. The rest of the world is taking note and there’s plenty to learn from this continued early work.
To learn more about what’s coming with AI, watch the Short Term to Long Term Predictions of AI webinar and discover how AI is shaping the future of telecom and how your organization can leverage these advancements for growth and success.
