Overview
With global 5G networks continuing to expand and be adopted, the industry is entering the 5G-Advanced (5G-A) era. As an evolution of 5G, 5G-A aims to further optimize network performance, improve user experience, and enable new use cases across industries.
Industry Progress and Demonstrations
MWC 2024 saw China Unicom announce ten 5G-A innovation demonstration results, exploring 5G-A technologies and business models and promoting applications across strategic emerging and future industries to support national digital development.
Beijing Large-Scale Demonstration
In Beijing, Beijing Unicom and Huawei collaborated under the 5G Capital framework to complete the first large-scale 5G-A network demonstration in China. The deployment provided contiguous coverage across three key sites: Financial Street, the Changhua Building, and Beijing Workers Stadium. Peak downlink rates reached 10 Gbps for 5G-A users, with continuous experience exceeding 5 Gbps. Joint trials with a national broadcaster covered naked-eye 3D, ultra-high-definition light compression, 8K high-rate uplink live production, and XR split rendering.
The joint "first 5G-A ultra-high-definition light-compression real-time production system" set a global record for sustained high uplink bitrate during real-time production, demonstrating 5G-A capabilities for new audiovisual experiences and offering a reference for network construction and application incubation that can be implemented and replicated.
Technical Approach
5G-A enhancements include techniques such as TDD+FDD three-carrier intelligent aggregation, enabling cross-generational experiences and driving audiovisual content toward higher definition, 3D, and immersive formats.
Addressing Deployment Challenges
As 5G-A technology matures, the key challenge is large-scale commercial deployment in existing networks. This requires deep integration of advanced vendor equipment and operator network operation capabilities. The Financial Street 5G-A network experiment focused not on extreme user experience or deployment scale, but on solving the principal deployment problem of high-frequency non-contiguous coverage through coordinated high- and low-frequency network planning. That approach achieved 1:1 integration with the existing network and delivered a smooth perceptual 5G-A experience using a minimal number of sites. The 5G Capital model makes large-scale, wide-area high-frequency deployments feasible.
Industry Perspective and Remaining Challenges
Yang Lifan, deputy general manager of Beijing Unicom, noted that successful mobile generations must provide service accessibility for typical users, adapt to contemporaneous industry development, and be economically viable. Looking forward, challenges remain: scaling single-point deployments to wide-scale rollouts; deploying indoor as well as outdoor; supporting temporary as well as permanent scenarios; achieving end-to-end QoE rather than single-metric improvements; guaranteeing worst-case latency even as average latency drops; and meeting ever-growing bandwidth demands driven by AI.
Historically, each mobile generation has addressed different bottlenecks and enabled new applications: 2G enabled basic web and images, 3G expanded video, 4G enabled HD video and interactive services, and 5G is driving AI and industrial-control applications. Predicting specific future applications is uncertain, but their direction will align with broader social and industrial development, particularly AI and industrial control.
Outlook
5G applications both enhance capability and create demand. The true value of 5G-A will emerge as applications mature. At mid-course, industry stakeholders are expected to collaboratively promote high-quality 5G-A deployment and unlock its value to support advanced industrial development.
