At Huawei’s online media and analyst pre-briefing for MWC Shanghai 2021, Peng Song, the President of Huawei’s Carrier Marketing & Solution Sales Department delivered a keynote speech titled “NetX 2025: The Path to Future Networks”. During this speech, Peng announced the release of the NetX 2025 White Paper, including supporting data based on IDC research and analysis. This paper introduces the GUIDE model, explaining what future operator networks will look like.
Over the past two decades, communication services have evolved from voice-only to include varieties of data, video, and many more. Wireless, transport, and IT technologies have developed alongside communication services to meet growing needs.
According to Peng, as the transformation toward an intelligent society accelerates, all industries are entering the digital era, in which ICT infrastructure will play a crucial role in the digital economy. Target-network planning for all service scenarios is the key to operators’ new growth. With target-network planning aiming for business success, the industry must act with the essence of business in mind. Telecom networks are bound to change tremendously to adapt to new service and technological needs. Therefore, operators will be required to make target network plans today in order to seize new opportunities tomorrow.
During his keynote, Peng shared Huawei’s vision for the target operator network of 2025. From the perspectives of business success and technological capabilities, Huawei believes that the target network must have five characteristics: Gigabit Anywhere, Ultra-Automation, Intelligent Multi-Cloud Connection, Differentiated Experience, and Environment Harmony.
Gigabit Anywhere is essential for target networks to provide digital services to users. Gigabit networks are the foundation upon which a company, a city, and even a country’s economy can grow. Gigabit connectivity is the most fundamental requirement for manufacturing applications like VR and AR, industrial camera, and production data collection.
Ultra-Automation is essential for target networks with intelligent O&M. With 5G seeing massive deployment and more operators launching industry digitalization services, the scale and complexity of networks are increasing exponentially. Operators must enable ultra-automation by adopting big data and intelligent technologies. Operator networks can create greater value by intelligently automating complex tasks and simplifying human work.
Intelligent Multi-Cloud Connection creates a target network platform for service aggregation. After years of development, cloud technology has evolved from traditional IT to cloud computing, and then to cloud-native. The digital transformation of enterprises has driven IT systems to become cloud-based, and the multi-cloud connection is now essential to meet requirements for cost control, service reliability, and multi-cloud disaster recovery. These changes have driven new requirements for intelligent multi-cloud connection and brought new opportunities for operators to develop cloud-network convergence services.
Differentiated Experience is the key to allowing target networks to facilitate business success. The essence of user experience is business, and the essence of business is monetization. More and more practices have proven that differentiated experience can create a premium. For example, in the enterprise and government market, stock exchanges are willing to pay 10 times the rent for a 1-ms lower network latency. For operators, differentiated experience means providing both best-effort experience and deterministic experience. A good experience can satisfy users’ personal needs and differentiated experience is where operators gain new value.
Environment Harmony is the target network’s commitment to social responsibilities and is part of the sustainable development strategy of leading operators worldwide. Operators must continuously innovate products and technologies to save energy, reduce emissions, and develop a circular economy. They should also drive industry players to cooperate in order to build a low-carbon society by enabling green connections, services, O&M, and applications through innovations in equipment, power, network deployment, data centres, operations, and applications.
The NetX 2025 White Paper, released at the pre-MWCS briefing, explains Huawei’s approach to target operator networks, including the driver of NetX 2025, the GUIDE model that characterizes NetX 2025, recommendations on developing NetX 2025, and important innovative technologies for 2025.
When closing his speech, Peng said that the GUIDE model of NetX 2025 for operators represents Huawei’s understanding of and vision for operators’ future networks and service development. Huawei is committed to working with operators and industries to explore and build future-oriented target networks and achieve business success by 2025.
