Associate Article
As 5G continues to mature, the battle for indoor wi-fi supremacy is rising
At a current WinWin Dwell interview at MWC 2026, U Cellular’s Senior Basic Supervisor and Head of Community Packages and Rollout, Jaime Chee, Huawei’s President of Huawei’s SmallCell Product Line, Dr. Philip Music, explored a strategic shift that’s redefining Malaysia’s digital infrastructure.
By embracing an “Indoor First” technique for 5G, U Cellular is deploying the nation’s largest-scale indoor agentic cell broadband community, positioning itself as a pacesetter within the transition towards 5G-Superior (5G-A) and cell AI.
A powerful enterprise case for ‘Indoor First’
The cell {industry} has lengthy understood that almost all cell utilization takes place indoors. Regardless of this, guaranteeing a high-quality community expertise in an indoor setting stays an enormous problem, notably as wi-fi applied sciences use spectrum in larger bands which have weaker penetration.
“Knowledge exhibits that as much as 80% of cell knowledge visitors happens indoors – whether or not in purchasing malls, places of work, transportation hubs, or residences. This implies we can not really fulfil our promise of ‘ubiquitous’ high-quality connectivity with out delivering a wonderful indoor 5G expertise,” defined Chee.
For U Cellular, its “ULTRA5G” model represents a proactive strategy to tackling this problem and delivering a differentiated consumer expertise. U Cellular has pledged to roll out over 600 in-building protection (IBC) websites by second half of 2029, aiming to ship “full-fledged and complete protection” that serves as the muse for cell AI and 5G Superior (5G-A) experiences all through these environments.
Transitioning to an Agentic MBB community
The technical spine of this rollout is Huawei’s 4G/5G built-in digital indoor answer (DIS). Not like conventional Distributed Antenna Methods (DAS), which frequently battle with excessive visitors masses and lack scalability, the DIS strategy gives a software-defined path to 5G-A.
“Huawei’s next-generation clever indoor answer was designed from inception to transcend conventional connectivity, serving as an Indoor Agentic MBB Community platform for the cell AI period with three key traits: clever pipes, clever connectivity, and clever O&M,” defined Dr Music.
Distributed MIMO (D-MIMO) is used to supply high-capacity, high-uplink, low-latency capabilities to help AI purposes like HD video, AR/VR and AI brokers. On the identical time, the answer gives sub-meter precision positioning, turning the community right into a sensory platform able to asset monitoring and supporting passive IoT.
Mixed, these enable the answer to energy each probably the most highly effective enterprise AI use circumstances and the AI IoT which will likely be important for the following era of sensible buildings.
As well as, the answer reaches L4 high-level autonomous operation for indoor situations, permitting operators to automate community upkeep and optimise buyer expertise.
“Our collaboration with U Cellular exemplifies translating these capabilities into tangible enterprise and social worth,” stated Dr. Music.
Constructing a platform for nationwide development
The partnership between U Cellular and Huawei is already having a serious impression for Malaysian society. The fast deployment, which as we speak already covers over 80 key websites, together with Kuala Lumpur Worldwide Airport and Berjaya Instances Sq., serves as a catalyst for enterprise digital transformation.
“We recognise that sturdy indoor 5G networks are important for enabling enterprise digital transformation and rising AI purposes, resembling sensible airports, sensible malls, sensible healthcare, and sensible manufacturing. For example, enabling extra environment friendly IoT machine administration, sensible safety and future AI analytics in industrial buildings,” stated Chee.
Trying forward, the following steps for the partnership will give attention to introducing much more capabilities, together with community slicing and open APIs. This can enable U Cellular to supply personalized digital personal networks with assured Service Degree Agreements for various industries.
“Huawei will proceed investing in R&D to make sure our options evolve easily to help 5G-A’s full potential. We’ll stand side-by-side with U Cellular, not solely offering expertise however co-creating innovation platforms to incubate AI and industry-specific options tailor-made for Malaysia,” stated Dr. Music.
With a goal of reaching 90% Protection of Populated Areas by second half 2027, this U Cellular and Huawei partnership is ready to construct a strong wi-fi basis for Malaysia’s financial development.
Try our full interview right here
