PARTNER CONTENT: At the 38th GTI Workshop, Yang Tao, Vice President of Huawei’s 5G&LTE TDD Product Line, shared insights into the global development trends and service experience characteristics of 5G FWA, revealing an industry-wide consensus on the strong growth of global FWA services and the beginning of a new stage for network construction. Such insights are invaluable for global operators in developing FWA services and building networks.

Yang remarked that 5G is developing rapidly worldwide, with more than 260 networks and more than 1.2 billion users. 5G FWA has become a mainstream service for half of 5G operators and has now amassed more than 10 million users. By developing FWA services at scale, operators have seen a growth in both 5G network revenue and profit. In GCC countries in the Middle East, leading operators have launched wireless home broadband packages featuring greater than 300 Mbps speeds. This has provided a backbone for diverse applications, such as video streaming and gaming, while ensuring excellent user experience and has already attracted a large number of home users. In Europe, FWA and optical fibers accelerate the upgrade of existing copper lines, helping operators quickly increase their share and revenue in the home broadband market.

As new business sectors such as AIGC and gaming mature, user demand for large-scale interactive games has surged, and enterprise users also require higher uplink rates. This brings new challenges to FWA services. To keep up with the global industry development, Huawei works with operators to explore the next evolutionary step for FWA based on the requirements of different markets. Yang remarked that the next steps would be optimizing uplink and downlink rates and latency, providing differentiated service assurance, promoting the maturation of the FWA industry, and accelerating the migration from 4G to 5G FWA. Yang also introduced FWA2, which aims to expand the FWA market by providing high-end experience, expanding enterprise markets, and migrating 4G home broadband users. Huawei brings FWA2 into reality with powerful solution innovations that help operators expand their business potential.

Commenting on the device prices that operators and analysts are most concerned about, Yang remarked that the price of 5G CPEs is close to USD100 this year, while that of RedCap CPEs launched in Q4 is just USD50. Huawei is working with numerous CPE partners to accelerate the maturation of the industry and it is estimated that by 2025, the price of 5G CPEs will approximate that of 4G CPEs.

5G FWA has become a mainstream service on 5G networks and a key home broadband access mode. Featuring fast deployment, excellent user experience, and low investment, FWA is growing faster than other home broadband paradigms in many countries and has become the best way for operators to rapidly expand their user base, accelerate business success, and fulfill the social responsibility of providing universal home broadband coverage.

According to multiple industry predictions, in the next five years, the number of 5G FWA users will soar from 10 million to 50 million. Embracing the strong growth momentum of FWA, more and more 5G operators have begun to accelerate deployment of 5G FWA services.