During the Mobile World Congress (MWC) that was recently held in Barcelona 2023, Huawei bagged a number of significant awards in various categories at GSMA’s Global Mobile (GLOMO) Awards.
Judged by the sector’s most prominent subject matter experts, GLOMO Awards are the industry’s most prestigious accolade that celebrate the companies, individuals and governments who have driven the greatest innovation in mobile and adjacent industries.
The company was awarded ‘Best Mobile Network Infrastructure’ for its MetaAAU series. This award recognizes Huawei’s long-term breakthroughs in Massive-MIMO with its innovative products that help build 5G networks with optimal performance and energy efficiency, industry’s simplest deployment, and industry’s strongest evolution capabilities.
The MetaAAU series is Huawei’s third-generation AAU products, including MetaAAU and Meta BladeAAU. This portfolio is the first-of-its-class to introduce the ELAA (Extremely Large Antenna Array) technology to open a new green track for Massive MIMO, and is the optimal solution for improving 5G coverage, capacity, and energy efficiency. Compared with the second-generation AAUs which use 192 antenna arrays, MetaAAU doubles the antenna array scale, uses narrower beams, and provides more focused energy. Combined with the unique AHR Turbo (Adaptive High-Resolution) beamforming algorithm, uplink and downlink coverage is improved by 3 dB, user experience is improved by 30%, and energy consumption is reduced by 30%. MetaAAU boosts both network performance and energy efficiency. It is a new direction for Massive MIMO innovation and a new path for stronger and greener 5G evolution.
In another category, Midea, China Mobile, and Huawei were named winners of the ‘5G Industry Challenge Award in collaboration with the GSMA 5G Hub’ for the 5G fully-connected laundry appliance factory project — the largest of its kind the world has ever seen — that they built together in Jingzhou, a major industrial city in China’s central Hubei province. This award recognizes the extensive application of 5G technologies to smart manufacturing.
Midea Group is a Guangdong-based leading electrical appliance manufacturer and plays a pioneering role in bringing 5G to manufacturing. With advanced mobile solutions provided by China Mobile and Huawei, it has built the world’s first 5G fully-connected factory in the home appliance sector. This is the first time that 5G has been fully applied to all industrial production and business operations. In this smart factory, 5G connections have been applied across 15 scenarios and all production links are seamlessly connected through 5G devices. To date, this is the industry’s largest 5G application in industrial campuses, with the largest number of 5G devices used and the most comprehensive use of 5G for production. The project has seen 5G replace complex cabling between machines in the factory, improving workplace safety and allowing machines to operate automatically for higher productivity.
Additionally, Huawei’s FDD Beamforming series took home the ‘Best Mobile Technology Breakthrough’. This award recognizes Huawei’s continuous work to create simplified ultra-wideband, precise multi-antenna beamforming, and green solutions. Huawei’s revolutionary beamforming products are helping operators across the globe build best-in-class 5G networks that feature the ultimate performance, lowest energy consumption, optimal user experience, and strongest evolution capability.
Huawei FDD beamforming series products consist of Massive MIMO, 8T8R, and Hertz antennas. Thanks to its exclusive intelligent beamforming algorithm, these products can flexibly support 4G and 5G beams. FDD Massive MIMO provides up to five-fold spectral efficiency, meeting operators’ requirements for capacity growth in hotspots. 8T8R is designed for FDD medium bands. It provides capacity- and experience-based solutions that can be widely deployed, and tackles issues like 4G congestion and poor indoor 5G experience. Compared with 4T4R, 8T8R brings three times the spectral efficiency, helping operators build experience.
The ‘Best Mobile Innovation for Emerging Markets’ award was another award Huawei received for RuralLink — Green, Simplified, and Evolvable Solution for Rural Connectivity, proving that Huawei’s continuous innovation in scenario-based coverage solutions for remote areas has been well recognized by the industry.
Around 40% of the world’s population still have no access to mobile Internet, and among those, hundreds of millions of people living in very remote areas are not even covered by mobile broadband networks. This has set the stage for Huawei to explore innovations that are able to expand mobile broadband to connect the unconnected while also being able to provide good experience.
Huawei’s RuralLink solution uses innovative unique technologies to address challenges in rural communications, and provides ubiquitous coverage with ultra-low cost and power consumption. This solution is the industry’s first to use microwave fronthaul technology. Rural sites can share baseband resources of existing base stations, eliminating the need to deploy independent baseband units. One RRU and one Channel Expand Antenna are capable of achieving three-sector coverage. Not only that, there is no longer a requirement for BBUs, which further reduces site power consumption. Only 4 PV modules are needed for supplying power to the entire site. With one-off deployment, RuralLink can currently support 2G, 3G, and 4G services and can evolve to 5G, providing long-term experience-guaranteed coverage for rural areas.
