Companion Article
At Cellular World Congress 2026, Fang Xiang, Huawei VP and President of Wi-fi Answer, outlined the corporate’s imaginative and prescient for what it calls the “Agentic MBB”.
Talking on the Huawei’s product and options launch, Fang argued that the speedy emergence of AI brokers is basically reshaping the best way we take into consideration community topology.
Huawei predicts that by 2035, the worldwide panorama will embody 900 billion brokers, with 90% of those working on cell units, creating a paradigm shift for community necessities.
Huawei’s response is to mix new AI-driven community intelligence with upgraded radio and baseband {hardware}, geared toward delivering greater uplink capability, decrease latency and extra adaptive useful resource administration.
“Agentic MBB (cell broadband) is the important thing step in the direction of an clever period,” Fang mentioned. “It will absolutely unleash the potential of numerous companies.”
Uplink and low latency to turn into important
In accordance with Fang, the shift in the direction of AI-driven functions will result in much more numerous and demanding MBB workloads. Whereas conventional cell networks have been largely optimised for downlink site visitors, the rise of AI brokers will improve the significance of uplink, low latency, and ubiquitous protection.
“As extra 5G functions emerge, expertise necessities for cell broadband start to diversify,” he mentioned. “Completely different customers have distinct community wants.”
A key driver is the expansion of multimodal AI interplay, the place brokers course of a number of varieties of knowledge concurrently.
“For multi-modal interactions, it requires gigabit uplink functionality,” Fang mentioned. “Brokers should course of textual content, movies, and pictures on the similar time, so they are going to want five-times the uplink functionality now we have right now.”
Latency may even turn into extra important as AI companies evolve from asynchronous cloud queries to real-time techniques involving robotics, automation, and immersive experiences.
“For AI robots to be human-like, an end-to-end latency of 400ms is crucial,” Fang mentioned.
A latency of 400ms or much less – usually termed the ‘Doherty Threshold’ – has lengthy been a metric for protecting person engaged when interacting with a pc.
Lastly, broad protection stays a limitation. If agent-enabled units are to develop past right now’s smartphones to incorporate autos, robots, and a variety of related objects, top quality protection can’t be restricted to city areas.
“Agent-powered units will prolong past present boundaries,” Fang mentioned. “We should prolong high-quality protection throughout villages, roadways, and uncovered areas.”
Reconstructing the community of the long run
To fulfill these necessities, telcos will quickly be pressured to fully rethink their method to cell community construct.
Step one, based on Fang, is to shift from a downlink-focussed method to a extra holistic mannequin prioritising uplink, latency, and protection, as talked about above.
Secondly, improved useful resource administration will probably be paramount. With the networks themselves rising extra complicated and with billions of AI brokers working excessive, guide community orchestration will quickly be unattainable. Automation should be infused all through O&M, evolving into what Fang calls an ‘Clever Dynamic Administration’ mannequin.
Lastly, diversified companies and buyer experiences will require a more in-depth understanding of the client’s distinctive wants, permitting the community to reply proactively to make sure top quality service.
“By evolving from API-based interplay to service-based intent interplay, the community can really perceive service wants,” Fang mentioned.
Huawei’s instruments for an Agentic MBB
To help this shift, Huawei has launched a set of recent merchandise and applied sciences designed to embed AI into each community administration and the underlying radio infrastructure.
Amongst these improvements is a brand new RAN Agent. Constructed on Huawei’s telecom basis mannequin, the RAN Agent is designed to allow intent-driven community automation. The RAN Agent works as a part of a closed-loop automation system overlaying forecasting, evaluation, decision-making and execution. It connects northbound to operator techniques by way of an A2A-T interface to interpret service intent, and southbound to Huawei’s Adaptive Air base stations to implement community adjustments.
This RAN Agent is supported by Huawei’s RAN Digital Twin System (RDTS), which fashions the bodily community property, units, and the encompassing surroundings. The RDTS then gives the digital basis of real-time knowledge on which the Agent can function.
Mixed, because of this the RAN can autonomously alter based mostly on the customers’ necessities, optimising the community by way of person expertise, O&M effectivity, and power utilization.
“RAN Agent creates a whole closed loop—forecast, analyze, determine, and execute. This makes true single-domain autonomy a actuality, delivering all-scenario experiences, clever community administration, and supreme power effectivity,” mentioned Fang.
Alongside the RAN Agent and enhanced RDTS capabilities, Huawei additionally showcased its GigaGreen Plus collection, which contains new antenna architectures and supplies designed to enhance efficiency and effectivity.
“Powered by improvements in new supplies, superior antenna architectures and engineering, it expands protection by 15%, units new benchmarks for power effectivity, and cuts measurement and weight by 30%,” defined Fang.
The collection contains the tri-band ultra-wideband MetaAAU and a 256-transmit antenna unit working within the 6 GHz band. These are designed to help 5G-Superior deployments able to delivering as much as 10 Gbps downlink and 1 Gbps uplink speeds.
Huawei additionally unveiled its next-generation UBBPi baseband platform, which makes use of a chiplet-based structure and near-memory computing to extend efficiency. The system doubles each capability and power effectivity in contrast with the earlier technology, whereas enabling what Huawei describes as “all-scenario cell-free” networking. This entails utilizing distributed entry factors to get rid of cell boundaries, selling seamless efficiency.
“All-scenarios cell-free is important to a service-centric expertise,” Fang mentioned, including that that superior coordination algorithms will permit the baseband to optimise sources throughout time, frequency, and spatial domains. This doubles cell-edge expertise and improves common expertise by 40%.
Making ready for an Agentic world
In the end, Huawei’s is {that a} community’s potential to know and reply to the wants of AI-driven companies in actual time will probably be very important to operators’ success. By combining intent-driven automation by its RAN Agent and Digital Twin techniques with new Adaptive Air radio and baseband platforms, the corporate is positioning its portfolio because the infrastructure basis for a future of AI-driven expertise and commerce.
“Collectively, we’ll construct highly effective, inexperienced, dependable and clever cell networks,” he mentioned. “Let’s catch the alternatives and create larger worth in a completely related clever world.”
