Huawei's David Wang: AI Reshapes UBB for New Growth
[Shanghai, China, June 19, 2025] At today's BDC Shanghai 2025, a summit hosted by the World Broadband Association (WBBA) alongside MWC Shanghai 2025, Huawei's Executive Director of the Board David Wang launched the company's newest AI ultra-broadband (UBB) solution during a keynote speech titled "AI Reshapes UBB for New Growth".
This solution can be divided into four sub-solutions – AI FAN, AI OTN, AI WAN, and ADN – which can be used to create home networks, bearer networks, and intelligent UBB control systems. The solution also embeds intelligence into network devices to improve the end-to-end network capabilities that carriers need to deliver premium experience for AI applications, guarantee both efficient mass data transmission to computing centers, and enable more efficient computing interconnection. Together, these innovations can help networks achieve higher-level autonomy faster, thereby stimulating new business growth.
David Wang, Huawei's Executive Director of the Board, delivering a keynote at WBBA BDC Shanghai 2025
With artificial general intelligence (AGI) picking up steam more quickly than predicted, large language models (LLMs) are evolving towards multi-modality. Agent capabilities and technologies that power the use of AI, such as the Model Context Protocol (MCP) and Agent-to-Agent Protocol (A2A), are also developing rapidly, which is helping industrial AI applications quickly mature.
In addition, the rise of the Mixture of Experts (MoE) technique, model distillation, and high-performance computing is quickly driving down inference cost. Over the past two years, the inference cost for LLMs has dropped by 99%. High-performance small foundation models and device-cloud synergy are driving AI uptake in smartphones, eyewear, computers, and other devices.
Huawei has adopted an All Intelligence strategy in response to these developments, under which it is prioritizing the development of full-stack AI capabilities and an open ecosystem platform. This strategy is improving Huawei's ability to provide leading AI solutions for the telecom industry, government and enterprise customers, and consumers. The company is currently also using AI to reshape network infrastructure like mobile broadband (MBB) and UBB.
In the home service market, digital home services are quickly being replaced by a vast range of new intelligent home applications. To address this, carriers are using AI to expand their service boundaries beyond networks and cloud services.
For bearer networks, the massive demand for services like computing interconnection and device-cloud synergy requires these networks to shift from best-effort to deterministic assurance for larger bandwidth, deterministic low latency, and ultra-high security.
To address these, UBB networks need to have stronger capabilities in their architecture, systems, and O&M.
Huawei's new AI UBB solution addresses requirements with its four sub-solutions – AI FAN, AI OTN, AI WAN, and ADN. The solution builds native intelligence directly into network devices to improve end-to-end network capabilities and guarantee premium experience for AI applications.
AI FAN: A home broadband upgrade that supports AI agents for intelligent home services
Huawei's AI FAN turns existing home gateways into unified AI portals that give home users easier access to AI services. It enables seamless user interaction through a wide range of methods such as voice, video, and gesture, and supports quick closed-loop management of local intelligent services with on-device computing power.
Multi-modal home application experience, especially intelligent HD video experience, relies on very large network bandwidth – 10 Gbit/s and 50G PON – which is significantly higher than the current standard of 1 Gbit/s and 10G PON. Huawei's AI FAN delivers industry-leading 50G PON, which allows carriers to provide ubiquitous 10 gigabit access.
With AI FAN, conventional optical line terminals (OLTs) can also be upgraded to intelligent devices that come equipped with their own edge computing power. This further supports device-edge-cloud compute synergy and enables experience optimization for AI applications.
AI OTN: High quality transmission for AI applications and compute scheduling with native intelligence and optical-electrical synergy
Low latency is a key factor in user experience for AI applications. One-millisecond compute access has become a fundamental requirement for urban AI computing networks. Demand for low-latency OTN computing networks with flexible bandwidth allocation and reliable SLA guarantee is also increasing as more and more local enterprise computing centers are being built. Huawei's AI OTN provides higher-quality transmission for AI applications and compute scheduling through innovations like native intelligence in network devices and optical-electrical synergy. It also proactively identifies service types and SLA requirements, and provides end-to-end differentiated assurance using AI-enabled analysis of the service flow features of intelligent applications.
Lower transmission latency is the key to efficient scheduling of computing power between the cloud, edge, and devices. AI OTN supports flexible allocation of optical spectrum resources and enables sub-wavelength-level optical switching (an upgrade from the current wavelength-level standard), which deliver ultra-low latency and one-hop data center access for different types of enterprise services.
As agile AI and compute services become increasingly crucial, AI OTN additionally utilizes an embedded AI digital twin simulation model powered by massive amounts of data to visualize and predict optical-layer parameters. This can make service rollout more efficient by automating and coordinating optical and electrical scheduling, which previously were done separately.
AI WAN: IP bearer network transformation for efficient computing with precise protection
AI WAN uses an AI model that can sense network traffic flows to precisely identify different types of AI services, including encrypted video flows and elephant flows, and provide differentiated service assurance. Traditional networks are only able to identify certain services, and have proven unable to identify these kinds of AI service flows.
AI WAN also uses technologies like intelligent flow scheduling and long-distance lossless transmission to provide comprehensive computing experience assurance (e.g., high throughput, zero packet loss, and zero jitter). It additionally uses routers with built-in security protection engines to identify unknown threats in real time and block threats within minutes. This type of intrinsic security protection can prevent intrusions and data theft across the entire network to improve computing security.
ADN: An AI-assisted, agent-centered, three-layer architecture for higher-level UBB autonomy
ADN is an AI-assisted architecture that uses innovative technologies such as AI agents, intelligent hardware, digital twins, and the Telecom Foundation Model to support L4 UBB autonomy. It has three layers: the network element (NE) layer, the control layer, and the service layer. At the NE layer, intelligent hardware is used to refine awareness and provide real-time closed-loop management of service and network quality. At the control layer, agents and copilots are deployed based on the Telecom Foundation Model. The service layer provides an operations platform that covers multiple domains and vendors.
L4 UBB networks aim to automate offsite services and reduce the amount of manual operations during onsite services. To do this, they have a unified agent that manages home broadband networks, OTNs, and IP networks, provides always-on services, and supports automated troubleshooting, network optimization, and experience assurance. This can greatly reduce the daily workloads of network operations centers, onsite managed service teams, and installation and maintenance personnel. When onsite services are required, the AI agent automatically assigns workers to handle issues on site, who then use copilots to identify and perform the needed operations more rapidly.
Concluding his speech, David Wang said, "The age of AGI is fast approaching, presenting unprecedented opportunities for the UBB industry." He then called on the entire industry to work together to reshape UBB networks with AI so that everyone could achieve new growth and shared development in the AI era. Specifically, he called for new business model exploration, the creation of unified industry standards and mature AI UBB capabilities, and the cultivation of more thriving application ecosystems.
MWC Shanghai 2025 will be held from June 18 to June 20 in Shanghai, China. During the event, Huawei will showcase its latest products and solutions in Hall N1 of the Shanghai New International Expo Center (SNIEC).
The commercial adoption of 5G-Advanced is accelerating in 2025. Huawei collaborates with global carriers, industry experts, and opinion leaders to explore how innovations in AI can be used to reshape telecom services, infrastructure, and operations to generate new revenue sources and accelerate the transition towards an intelligent world.
For more information, please visit: https://carrier.huawei.com/en/events/mwcs2025
