Huawei unveils AI-centric network for telecom growth

Huawei has introduced its AI-Centric Network solution, aiming to help telecommunications carriers seize opportunities presented by artificial intelligence developments.

Yang Chaobin, Director of the Board and CEO of Huawei's ICT Business Group, highlighted the significant transformations AI is expected to drive within society.

"The emergence of high-quality, low-cost, and open-source AI models will give rise to a wide range of new innovation in applications and accelerate the advent of an intelligent world," he stated.

Yang emphasised that AI advancements would bring change at multiple levels, providing individuals with personalised experiences, enabling intelligent collaboration within organisations, and facilitating broader access to intelligence at a societal level.

The Information and Communications Technology (ICT) sector is expected to experience unprecedented growth due to evolving technology and more varied application scenarios, although these developments will simultaneously increase demands on network infrastructure.

Yang explained that carriers would need significant advancements in bandwidth, latency, coverage, and operations and maintenance (O&M) to capitalise on these growth opportunities.

"Huawei's AI-Centric Network solution is designed to address these needs," Yang declared.

"It revolutionizes network capabilities to enable all-domain connectivity. It will power a shift towards application-oriented O&M, and will reshape telecom service and business models to take full advantage of new opportunities presented by AI."

The AI-Centric Network adopts a four-layered approach to address the challenges carriers face, according to Yang.

The first layer, all-domain connectivity, enhances the collaboration between AI and networks, optimising resource orchestration for routing and bandwidth. This will allow intelligent applications to benefit from universal network access, ensuring high standards of uplink and downlink as well as service level agreement (SLA) assurances.

The second layer involves shifting from resource-oriented to application-oriented O&M.

"Huawei's Telecom Foundation Model supports predictive and proactive O&M, experience optimization based on application-level awareness, and tailored, more fine-grained operations," said Yang.

This shift is expected to significantly boost O&M efficiency and elevate user experience.

In the third layer, enhanced AI-to-X services, AI-centric networks will cater to varied AI scenarios at the user level by ensuring appropriate bandwidth, latency, and reliability. At an organisational level, these networks can overcome existing capacity and response time limitations, evolving to support interactions beyond person-to-person, such as person-to-agent and agent-to-agent.

At a societal level, these networks aim to facilitate AI adoption in public services, contributing to more inclusive community value globally.

The final layer explores innovative business models, offering carriers new opportunities to monetise experience beyond traditional traffic metrics. "This will unleash the full potential of connectivity and open up new revenue streams," Yang remarked.

Yang concluded, "We need to join hands and work together across the telecom industry."

"By exposing network capabilities, collaborating with different industries, and engaging in scenario-specific innovation, we can make the most of new growth opportunities in the age of AI, and bring the world one step closer to a brighter, more intelligent future."