GSMA | MWC23 Barcelona – To Infinity and Beyond with 5G-Advanced

MWC23 Barcelona – To Infinity and Beyond with 5G-Advanced

On Wednesday 1st March 2023, GSMA was joined by expert speakers during the 5G Futures Summit at MWC23 Barcelona to explore how 5G-Advanced will revolutionise the industry as a key enabler of AR/VR services including the Metaverse and massive IoT with its enhanced uplink connectivity and how it will take us beyond our current technologies, bridging 5G and 6G.

Throughout the jam-packed session, moderated by Sylwia Kechiche, Principal Industry Analyst at Ookla, we heard from five keynotes speakers, starting with an introduction from GSMA CTO, Alex Sinclair, on what 5G-Advanced is, providing a top-level overview of the advancements already seen in the market today ahead of the 3GPP Release 18 due in 2024.

In the first of the session’s keynote series we heard from Bernard Despres, Vice-President Core Network, Automation, Security, E2E services at Orange, who discussed the power of 5G-Advanced in enabling hyper-automation, creating private 5G networks and how Orange is accelerating global 5G adoption and deployment through its 5G labs.

Next, we heard from Dr Xiaodong Xu, Chief Specialist at China Mobile, on 5G-Advanced adoption. Dr Xu explored China Mobile’s vast number of commercial use cases within China and discussed the three driving forces behind the 5G evolution so far; low complexity, low cost, and sustainability, supported with examples.

We then moved into how 5G-Advanced is empowering AI innovations with Alan Loh, Executive General Manager at Zain KSA. Mr Loh explored how 5G-Advanced is taking us to even greater heights of value and new opportunities, providing the latest innovations and use cases from Zain KSA.

Following this we heard from John Gao, 5.5G General Manager at Huawei, on the topic of accelerating the 5G-Advanced industry to build a better and more intelligent world. Mr Gao explored the evolution of mobile connectivity and the new service trends and opportunities seen with 5G networks.

For the session’s final keynote, we heard from Tingfang Ji, VP R&D Group at Qualcomm, who explored how the 5G-Advanced evolution is taking the industry to new heights and how it will bring intelligence to the edge of the cloud to allow market players to balance compute with communication to achieve optimal performance.

Following the keynote presentations, we invited our four expert panelists to join us on stage for a Q&A discussion. We were joined by speakers from Hong Kong Telecom, Ericsson, du and NVIDIA to discuss why we should be looking forward to 5G-Advanced to drive new and innovative wireless services and why it is needed to meet new market demands for AR/VR and Web 3.0 services supported by use case examples throughout the discussion. Watch the full discussion on-demand.

During the session the GSMA 5G Futures Community was launched, a community aimed at supporting the industry in 5G technology deployment and adoption. Find out more here and contact us today to get involved.