Building Foundational Network Capabilities to Unlock 5G-A Business Value in the Mobile AI Era

[Barcelona, Spain, March 3, 2026] During MWC Barcelona 2026, Huawei held the 5G-A Industry Evolution Roundtable that gathered global industry leaders, ecosystem partners, and operators to dive into a diverse mix of major topics. The discussions centered on enhancing continuous coverage, GigaUplink, and cross-generation user experiences for user-centric networks in the era of 5G-AxAI. A major focus was placed on the shifting of monetization from traffic to user experience. These discussions aimed to promote the mobile industry to bridge the gap between technical progress and sustainable business success.

Guest gathering at 5G-A Industry Evolution Roundtable

The roundtable opened with remarks from Ritchie Peng, President of Huawei's ICT Strategy & Business Development, highlighting 5G's enduring role in mobile networks. "5G is still the most mature, advanced technology underpinning service innovation and future development." Peng said that centering on user experience has become a shared industry goal. To meet the increasingly higher needs for uplink, latency, and reliability, new services and technologies need to be considered when developing mobile networks. This is the key to realizing multidimensional monetization based on different service, scenario, and user requirements.

5G-A is accelerating globally. According to guests from analyst firms, 5G-A is making rapid progress in standards, deployment, and business. A complete end-to-end ecosystem is forming rapidly. Autonomous technologies are gaining traction, helping operators make their networks more efficient and capable. More importantly, AI is being deeply integrated with 5G-A to create a new network paradigm of 5G-AxAI, which will spur industry growth. Partners from the device industry shared their views on the new requirements of autonomous driving, calling for the rapid scaling of 5G-A to ensure wider coverage, lower latency, higher mobility, and higher reliability.

The operators and partners at the roundtable discussed major topics like challenges and opportunities facing 5G/5G-A evolution and business monetization. They believe that the convergence of 5G-A and AI will enable multimodal interaction, which will require the deterministic high bandwidth, low latency, and wide coverage for adding intelligence to mobile services in all settings. They agreed that user-centricity is the key to forming a sustainable positive business cycle. Sustained efforts are needed to improve the user experience of high-value applications like FWA, HD livestreaming, cloud gaming, and smart home. These applications are critical to maximizing the business value of 5G-A and stimulating global 5G-A growth. Dr. Philip Song, President of Huawei Small Cell Domain, highlighted indoor areas as high-value scenarios of mobile networks, calling for sustained efforts to build indoor networks that provide experiences consistent with outdoor networks by ensuring intelligent networks, O&M, and services. In this opinion, this is the key to accelerating the transformation from digitalization to intelligence and building a futureproof mobile industry.

David Li, President of Huawei 5G&LTE TDD Domain, capped off the event by highlighting how the rapid rise of new services like livestreaming and AI-powered applications creates new network requirements for continuous basic 5G coverage, multidimensional capabilities, and consistent experiences, which brings new business opportunities to operators. In his closing remarks, Li reaffirmed that Huawei will continue to innovate in the high bandwidth, GigaUplink, low latency, and scalable networks required to bring user experience-centric business models to the world and help operators achieve sustained business success. He called for partners to jointly develop the 5G-A industry and Mobile AI ecosystem and build a solid foundation for the technology, businesses, and entire industry of mobile communications.

MWC Barcelona 2026 will be held from March 2 to March 5 in Barcelona, Spain. During the event, Huawei will showcase its latest products and solutions at stand 1H50 in Fira Gran Via Hall 1.

The era of agentic networks is now approaching fast, and the commercial adoption of 5G-A at scale is gaining speed. Huawei is actively working with carriers and partners around the world to unleash the full potential of 5G-A and pave the way for the evolution to 6G. We are also creating AI-Centric Network solutions to enable intelligent services, networks, and network elements (NEs), speeding up the large-scale deployment of level-4 autonomous networks (AN L4), and using AI to upgrade our core business. Together with other industry players, we will create leading value-driven networks and AI computing backbones for a fully intelligent future.

For more information, please visit: https://carrier.huawei.com/en/minisite/events/mwc2026/.