The arrival of 5.5G, or 5G-Advanced (S5G-A), is just in time to upgrade the connections of people, homes, things, vehicles and industries, according to Cao Ming, president of wireless at Huawei (www.huawei.com), speaking at last week’s Global Mobile Broadband Forum in Dubai.

Cao said 5.5G was “well timed to support new experiences, connections and services”, highlighting that Huawei’s full-series 5.5G offering should help operators deliver full-scenario tenfold capabilities and enable high energy efficiency, spectrum use and O&M efficiency.

He said 5G had undergone commercial expansion for over four years, developing faster than previous mobile technologies. Scaled 5G adoption created momentum for the growth of the digital economy, he said. 5G is driving many new experiences, connections and services. It has opened the door to an immersive world for individual and home users, and has extended IoT connections into all scenarios, finding its way to core production, empowering flexible production, all while accelerating vehicle to everything (V2X) services that drive smart transport.

He said 5.5G had arrived just in time to upgrade the connections of people, homes, things, vehicles and industries. Huawei’s full-series 5.5G offering can help operators build 5.5G networks thanks to continuous innovations across five categories of basic capabilities: broadband, multi-band, multi-antenna, intelligent and green.

Extremely large antenna arrays (ELAAs) have helped commercial 5G networks boost TDD coverage and energy efficiency. As telecom moves to 5.5G, ELAAs have been further upgraded. Based on this, the industry’s first 128T Meta AAU (active antenna unit) that integrates over 500 antenna elements can work with multidimensional high-resolution beam algorithms to improve experiences. With the ELAA upgrade, the industry’s first dual-band 64T Meta AAU can work with dual-band converged elements to enable the co-coverage between high and low bands, delivering 5 to 10Gbits experiences together with multi-carrier offerings.

The industry’s first FDD triple-band massive MIMO and triple-band 8T modules support GHz-level bandwidth, enabling 1.8+2.1+2.6GHz in one box, and can work with FDD beamforming to improve FDD spectral and energy efficiencies. Compared with 4T4R, FDD triple-band massive MIMO boosts capacity by ten times and coverage by 10dB. FDD triple-band 8T8R improves spectral efficiency by three times and coverage by 7dB when working with true wideband and dynamic power sharing.

The mm-wave industry has progressed to maturity, said Cao. The industry’s first mm-wave AAU embodies more than 2000 antenna elements to overcome the limitations of mm-wave on co-site co-coverage with C band. Through the coordination between high and low bands, mm-wave networks can deliver a peak throughput of 10Gbit/s, with an average at 5Gbit/s. This AAU also supports intelligent beam management, breaking the limitation of mm-wave regarding high-speed mobility and NLOS transmission.

The LampSite X series integrates five bands and mm-wave in one box to support full bandwidth across all bands for all radio access technologies. It also supports super deep dormancy to reduce off-peak power consumption to 1W. To ensure the coverage required by underground parking areas and other similar areas, the multi-band medium-power LightSite module can ensure a 35% better user experience and lower TCO than common DAS.

Green antennas leverage direct injection feeding to redefine antenna architecture and Meta Lens to aggregate beam energy for a 25% higher energy efficiency. Microwave has a platform called MagicsWave to upgrade transport networks. MagicsWave supports ultra-wide multi-channel transmission to boost backhaul efficiency, with higher capacity for urban areas and longer transmission distance for suburban areas. It features a high level of integration, enabling networks to sustain evolution over the coming ten years.

IHashBand2.0 redefines multi-band spectrum usage: Serving cell (MB-SC) enables discontinuous spectrum to be flexibly combined for virtual large bandwidth, making 10Gbit/s possible while achieving a 40% higher spectral efficiency. Flexible spectrum access (FSA) supports flexible full uplink band access, bringing uplink to Gbit/s with a 40% higher spectral efficiency.

Full-series equipment supports 0bit, 0W, becoming the first in the industry to support super deep dormancy with a 99% shutdown depth, on-demand fast wakeup, and millisecond-level shutdown at both the carrier and channel levels. This realises intelligent coordination between power supplies and equipment, ensuring 0bit, 0W at site level. With iPowerStar, site-specific energy saving policies can be implemented based on traffic trends at different times of day, helping realise 0bit 0W at network level.

Networks will depend on more bands to provide more services and connections, justifying the trends of 5.5G to advance to high-level autonomy. IntelligentRAN supports L4 intent-based intelligence. This means prevention and prediction are possible to replace reactive network O&M with proactive methods, networks are aware of service intents to deliver better deterministic experiences, and multi-objective decision-making is supported to optimise service experience and network energy efficiency.

“The future has come,” said Cao. “Huawei will continue to develop innovative products in collaboration with all industry partners to bring 5.5G into reality.”