Ken Hu, Deputy Chairman and Rotating CEO of Huawei has announced X Labs, a new research platform that will bring together operators, technology providers, and vertical industry partners to jointly explore future use cases for mobile applications, drive innovation in business and technology, and promote an open industry ecosystem at the the seventh annual Mobile Broadband Forum (MBBF) in Tokyo, Japan.
Beyond video, the second major opportunity for carriers is in the household market. Right now, there are around two billion households in the world. Of these, 1.3 billion don't have broadband connections, and 300 million have connections slower than 10 Mbps.
These 1.6 billion households are an ideal market for wireless broadband. To date, more than 100 telecom operators have deployed Huawei's wireless-to-the-x solutions (WTTx), covering 30 million households.
Payback periods have proven to be far shorter than those for fixed broadband networks.
The third opportunity identified by Hu, the vertical market, is on the verge of growth. Mobile networks have become the key enabler of digital transformation, and against this backdrop, Hu encourages operators to identify specific opportunities that can best leverage the capabilities of mobile communications, and then adopt a fresh mindset when it comes to collaboration.
He emphasised that service providers and industry players have to work closely together to more effectively adjust to new and complex business models.
According to Hu, this evolution depends on three key factors: connectivity, architecture, and application-enablement platforms.
Enhanced connectivity
In order to connect millions of new applications for people and things, future networks need enhanced connectivity, improved network performance, and new technology for new services. Beyond better support for video services, networks also need to introduce wide-area IoT technology for connections between things, and Cellular-V2X technology for connected vehicles.
End-to-end cloud architecture
An application-centric network needs end-to-end cloud architecture to achieve true elasticity. Huawei's innovation focuses on full cloudification of mobile networks, from core to access—and especially air interface—to help its customers boost network performance and reduce overall costs.
Application-enablement platforms (PaaS)
Application-centric networks need strong application-enablement platforms. These platforms should provide APIs, data storage, data analytics capabilities, and cloud management services in order to open up network capabilities and accelerate application development.
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