Upholding the Spirit of “Openness, Cooperation and Win-win” To Solidify Industry Ecosystem and Build a Better Connected World

[BARCELONA, SPAIN, Feb. 21, 2016] On the eve of Mobile World Congress 2016, Huawei hosted the Digital Transformation Summit in Barcelona, Spain. Centering around five major topics, including 4.5G, NB-IoT, 5G, Small Cell, Video and Digital Operations, Huawei invited over 500 guests from world’s leading telecom operators, industry associations, vertical analyst institutions and media outlets joining together to hold open discussions on opportunities, challenges and trends in digital transformation.

Zou Zhilei, President of Carrier Business Group at Huawei.

Zou Zhilei, President of Carrier Business Group at Huawei, shared,

“Driven by technology innovation, ubiquitous connectivity has initiated a trend of global digital transformation, which in turn will bring all-new growth drivers to a great number of vertical industries. Digital transformation does not only create opportunities for the telecom industry to overtake itself, but also drive the innovation in various industries. With the commitment to constructing open platforms and enabling operators, we aim to construct a robust industry ecosystem in the spirit of ‘Openness, Cooperation and Win-win’, so as to accelerate digital transformation. In the meantime, we are also constructing quality communications platforms like Digital Transformation Summit to foster the growth of ICT industry alliance.”

Several forums were held at the Digital Transformation Summit to discuss the opportunities, challenges and trends in digital transformation:

• Video Anywhere Summit: This event explored how telecom operators can expand video businesses and standardize video experience, so as to make video a backbone business of telecom operators. Attending guests discussed how telecom operators can grasp the opportunities in this scale video market worth 100 billion US dollars, so as to return to the upstream of value chain. One of the key topics discussed is the unified standard of video industry based on user experience. At the event, Dr. Chaesub Lee, Director of Telecommunication Standardization Bureau, ITU shared the trends and significance of standardized videos, and inspired all parties in the industry to proactively take part in the standardization process.

• Digital Operations Forum: Under the theme of enabling digital transformation, building a digital industry ecosystem, and achieving agile digital operations, attending guests at this high-level symposium discussed the challenges of digital operations and initiatives to address them, and explored feasible pathways for enterprises to promote digital transformation through agile digital operations. Peter Sany, President and Chief Executive Officer of TM Forum, together with Stephen Saunders, Founder and CEO of Light Reading, initiated that operators and enterprises should not only build infrastructures facing the future and ensure efficient operations and agile innovations, but also construct an open industry ecosystem to propel the collaboration of all players in the digital value chain, which can ultimately contribute to the advancement of digital economy.

• First 4.5G Summit: Centering on the three core concepts of 4.5G: “Gbps”, “Experience 4.0” and “Connection+”, attendees shared their successful experience in commercialization or pre-commercialization trials, and discussed future deployment plans. Abraham Foss, CEO of TeliaSonera Norway, introduced the deployment status of the world’s first 4.5G commercial network. A number of telecom operators shared their strategies, plans and trial results, including SoftBank from Japan and China Mobile on “Gbps”, HKT on “Experience 4.0”, as well as Vodafone and British EE on “Connection+”. At the event, Huawei joint hands with TeliaSonera Norway, HKT, P4 from Poland, LG Uplus from Korea and VIVA from Kuwait to host a 4.5G strategic cooperation launch ceremony, signifying the commencement of scale commercialization of 4.5G across the world.

• Small Cell Summit: This event focused on many industry hot topics, such as indoor digitalization, unlicensed spectrum and new indoor business models. Huawei released the Small Cell White Paper, which covers five important trends leading to the year of 2020: small cells to build brand-new business models and industrial ecosystems, indoor digitalization to drive MBB upgrade, multimode, multiband, backhaul integrated outdoor small cells to match diverse site resources, convergence of licensed and unlicensed spectrum to improve spectral efficiency, as well as ubiquitous small Cells to drive the evolution of network architecture. At the event, Huawei and six leading operators from the Philippines, China, Middle East, Indonesia and India to launch the official global commercialization of Lampsite2.0.

• NB-IoT Industry Summit: Being the first global summit in the NB-IoT sector, the Summit grouped top enterprises and institutions in industry. The summit saw the announcement of the establishment of NB-IoT Forum, an industry alliance, summoned by GSMA with Huawei, Vodafone, Ericsson, China Mobile, China Unicom, AT&T, Deutsche Telecom, Etisalat, GTI, Intel, KDDI, KT, LG Uplus, Mediatek, Nokia, Oberthur Technologies, Qualcomm, Telecom Italia, Telefónica, u-blox and Verizon.

MWC 2016 will be held in Barcelona, Spain from February 22 to 25. Huawei will showcase its latest products and solutions at Fira Gran Via Hall 1 and Hall 3. For more details, please visit: http://www.huawei.com/en/mwc2016.