Original article Total Telecom:Read More
Partner Article
At MWC 2025, we spoke with Huawei’s Vice President of Wireless Product Line, Mr Fang Xiang, about the paradigm shift facing operators in the mobile AI era and what this will mean for their networks
‘With the explosive growth of mobile AI, operators are facing significant changes and new opportunities. For Huawei’s Fang Xiang, speaking after the company’s co-located Mobile AI Network Summit, mobile operators should take a proactive approach to capitalise on these opportunities.
“We’re beginning to usher in an AI mobile era,” said Fang. “Many AI use cases are already in development, from AI-powered new calling with live translation to agentic AI personal assistants, and the number of AI-powered devices is increasing rapidly too. There are major opportunities here to monetise new customer experiences.”
His comments echo those of Huawei’s Chief Strategy Architect Dang Wenshuan, who noted during the Summit that user behaviour is becoming increasingly dynamic, with a growing engagement with digital services.
“With new digital services, every person could be a high-volume traffic consumer at any time, in any place. So, the term hot spot becomes blurred. Any place could be a hot spot,” said Dang. “We can monetise these context-based experiences, whether the user is known to be a live broadcaster, a gamer, or a traveller, or is in specific locations like a stadium or on the metro. Using AI, we can target them in real time.”
New interactions, new opportunities
One of the most exciting features of this new mobile AI era is the way in which customers will engage with the network, with natural language, hand gesture and facial expression capabilities improving the quality and quantity of user interactions.
“Currently, our interaction with mobile networks is mostly limited to our touchscreens,” explained Fang. “Going forward, we’ll have multimodal interactions, including using natural language, hand gesture and facial expression to interact with intelligent devices. This will not only make using AI more intuitive but create many new use cases.”
This ease of access by which AI services are activated will be mirrored by the increasing pervasiveness of AI-powered devices. In the future, customers’ digital lives will not only be focussed on their phones and laptops, but on an ever-growing list of intelligent devices.
“The market is currently dominated by smartphones, but in the future, we’ll have many types of intelligent devices, like intelligent wearables, glasses, and watches.” said Fang. “We’ll also have a growing number of AI-powered intelligent robots. All of these devices represent a huge opportunity for telcos.”
In addition, to these new modes of interaction and an expanded device ecosystem, the types of traffic being created will also change dramatically, with HD images and 3D video becoming commonplace.
“Soon we’ll be creating more 3D content and content in the virtual space itself. Customers will be creating content while on the move using their connected devices. They will want services that can help them with that, and networks that can provide service assurance,” said Fang.
Rethinking network monetisation
Given the above factors, the possibility for new telco services in the AI era is undeniably vast. To take full advantage of this shifting ecosystem, operators must embrace business model innovation, working to better understand customer needs and create unique services.
“Operators need to change their mindset towards monetisation,” said Fang. “In the past, operators have monetised their network based primarily on user traffic, but moving forward they will need to focus on differentiated experiences and services.”
The initial focus for operators will be on developing premium services for high value customers, but Fang is quick to point out that AI will soon become ubiquitous, available to all telco customers and embedded in every mobile device.
“This is a journey. In the beginning of any new technology’s life, it will be the high-end users that get to benefit first. For mobile AI, this is partly because of hardware requirements, like computing power, that is only available on certain devices,” he explained. “But those barriers will come down with time. Just look at Deepseek – AI inference costs have been reduced by 97%.”
“This is the same journey we’ve been on with mobile internet and mobile video. As we go deeper, AI technology and mobile AI services will quickly become widely available to consumers,” he added.
One of Huawei’s key partners in this space, Chinese GenAI company, is an excellent example of the rapidly scaling AI opportunity. The company’s AIGC products, such as generative text, image, video, voice, and real time video call services, are already in use by over 500,000 customers. In addition, last year the company launched its AutoGLM, an agentic AI agent, capable of liking and commenting on social media posts, purchasing reordering previously purchased products, booking hotels, buying train tickets, and ordering food.
“New services and new business models are emerging rapidly, both in the industry and consumer space,” explained Fang. “Soon, all mobile users will be harnessing AI on a daily basis.”
Building an AI-ready foundation
Supporting this myriad of new AI use cases – many of which demand rapid uplink, low latency, and high capacity – will potentially be a challenge for telco networks. Thankfully, leveraging AI within telco networks themselves is already providing huge gains in operational efficiency.
“We often say ‘AI for network, and network for AI’,” explained Fang, “These two elements are closely linked. Telcos should embrace both aspects to thrive in the mobile AI era.”
With this in mind, Huawei’s focus has been two-fold, combining their GigaBand and GigaGreen solutions.
The company’s GigaBand technology focuses on combining multiple bands improving spectral efficiency, helping to improve both uplink and downlink experience for customers. By provisioning multi-dimensional resource scheduling, this technology can allow for real-time human-machine interaction.
“Our overarching philosophy with Gigaband is ‘all in one, and one for all’,” Fang explained. “Our customised GigaBand solution can handle all devices, all network architectures, and all services in one. This will help telcos to improve their user experience and their network efficiency.”
At the same time, Huawei’s GigaGreen solutions further simplify the network, leveraging massive intelligent receiver (M-Receiver) technology to help improve uplink capabilities, and deliver a more than 30% energy consumption reduction.
“This solution can enable mobile operators deliver optimal experience to new services while also reducing ownership cost and their energy bill,” said Fang.
“We’re helping operators to build a multidimensional mobile AI network and based on that network we can help them provide higher uplink, larger capacity, and wider coverage. This will mean they are well prepared for future business developments and opportunities to create higher value,” he concluded.
Operators are ready for change
While AI is far from the silver bullet that will solve all the challenges facing the mobile industry, the overwhelming feeling amongst operators towards the technology is one of great optimism.
“I have great faith in the operators to use this new technology effectively,” said Fang. “At Huawei, we’ll continue to innovate alongside our industry partners to ensure that operators have the networks they need to support their customers in the mobile AI era.”