Huawei, HKT, and GSA jointly release Indoor 5G Scenario Oriented White Paper

During the 2019 Global Mobile Broadband Forum (MBBF), Huawei, HKT, and GSA jointly released the Indoor 5G Scenario Oriented White Paper. This white paper describes indoor services in the 5G era and the requirements of different services for 5G networks. It also elaborates on the indoor 5G network planning and construction ideas that holistically take into account the characteristics of buildings and services in key scenarios such as stadiums, hospitals, and transportation hubs.

The Indoor 5G Scenario Oriented White Paper states that building on 4G, 5G provides richer services and further extends industry boundaries. It is predicted that 80% of data traffic will occur indoors in the future. 5G provides basic data services and importantly, more applications for life, business, and industry. 5G will make people’s work, lives, and travel more convenient and intelligent, by means of automatic driving, holographic conferences, cloud VR, and immersive sports events or entertainment programs. 5G can help enterprises improve production efficiency and build smart production systems, such as smart factories, smart mines, and smart hospitals. For industry applications, 5G can help governments achieve efficient social governance.

GSA President Joe Barrett said: “5G will be closely related to vertical industries, which were completely independent of each other in the past. For example, in the future, 5G will become a vital part of smart building property infrastructure, just as important as water, electricity, and gas, and will become the core of smart city evolution.” 

5G construction has to serve improving user experience while adopting new business models. By building networks on demand, a new ecosystem can be nurtured to benefit both industry partners and operators. 5G construction will impose two major changes to operators’ services: business model reconstruction and vertical networking architecture. 

HKT Wireless Network Planning and Design Senior Vice President Sheldon Yau said: “In recent years, indoor traffic keeps increasing in HKT and accounts for more than 85% of the total traffic in 2019. 5G will further spur indoor data traffic breakout, but traditional passive indoor distributed systems cannot address the technology evolution and capacity challenges in 5G era.  Hence, a full fibre-based Digital Indoor System must be constructed to provide supreme user experience, intelligent O&M, and efficient operation.” 

Huawei’s MBB Domain General Manager Duan Xuepeng said: “Indoor digital networks will become a high value ground of mobile networks. Indoor digitisation has become an inevitable trend of industry development. Huawei is an industry-leading provider of E2E 5G indoor digital coverage solutions, with abundant experience in 5G indoor networking consultation and planning, 5G scenario-oriented solutions, 5G digital products and integration, and industrial eco-system development. Huawei is proactively promoting the 5G indoor digitalisation progress of the world.”

Currently, Huawei has helped 140 operators in 85 countries construct more than 60,000 indoor high-value sites. In the future, Huawei will continue to increase investment in digital indoor coverage solutions, deepen cooperation with operators and industry partners to explore new business models, construct a brand new industry ecosystem, and jointly build indoor 5G networks of higher intelligence, efficiency, and profitability.