Huawei at MBBF 2023: The Future of Smart Home Living

MBBF 2023 just wrapped last week in Dubai. The event — also known as the Global Mobile Broadband Forum — is hosted each year by Huawei in cooperation with GSMA, GTI, and the SAMENA Telecommunications Council. It’s Huawei’s annual chance to highlight areas of growth and focus — the company’s key initiatives and partnerships — which this year included plans to bring 5.5G to reality, its progress on Fixed Wireless Access and more. 

At MBBF 2023, Huawei showcased its collaboration with du (once known as Emirates Integrated Telecommunications Company, or EITC). The two companies jointly unveiled the world’s first 5G Advanced (5G-A), a collaboration that was first announced in March.

The companies say this is what smart home living will look like in the future — an advance that will be powered by 10 Gbps networks. The 5.5G demonstration Villa also featured Fixed Wireless Access service or FWA capabilities. 

In the real world, China Mobile is driving the transformation of Hangzhou from the “The First 5G City” to the “The First 5.5G City.”

This could be the start of a new era in 10G smart homes.

The 5G-A Villa in Dubai illustrated the seamless integration of cutting-edge technologies to yield a smart home experience enriched with applications such as naked-eye 3D and XR. (“Naked-eye 3D” projects multiple views of an image or video from different angles to add more depth to a standard picture or video.)

Transformative Catalyst

Developments like give us a glimpse of what consumers will demand going forward.

In a lunchtime speech, Fahad Al Hassawi, CEO of du said, brought attendees back to 5G’s beginnings, describing how, since those days, FWA has been a transformative catalyst, empowering the delivery of cutting-edge solutions for the company’s customers.

In a Keynote Address, Li Peng, Huawei’s Corporate Senior Vice President and President of the companies Carrier BG, focused on the 5G-A Powered Villa at the Home of the Future. He said the next generation of 5G technologies will help operators maximize the value of their current investments.

Both discussed FWA extensions — FWA Pro, FWA Lite and FWA Biz — services engineered to meet the 10 Gbps needs of various parts of each community.

To illustrate, 5.5G wireless technology was deployed at the Hangzhou Asian Games. 

At the opening ceremony roughly 100,000 people (80,000 spectators and 20,000 workers) gathered at the Hangzhou Olympic Sport Center Stadium (nicknamed “Big Lotus.”) 

This new wireless service worked well throughout the event. 

It was interesting how China Telecom combined artificial intelligence or AI and big data analytics to deploy internet at a higher level. They say this also made 5G smarter.

MBBF 2023 in Dubai showed how both 5G-A and FWA technology will impact what tomorrow will look like, today.

This is a very exciting time in the wireless industry. This is something every investor in the space should be aware of.