The Tech Behind 5 Global Mobile Awards

Designed to recognize the mobile industry’s leading innovators, GSMA’s Global Mobile (GLOMO) 2020 awards concluded at the end of February, with GSMA ranking Huawei best-in-class in five categories:

• 5G Leadership Award
• Tech of the Future Award
• Best Mobile Innovation for Work
• Best Mobile Innovation for Smart Cities
• Best Mobile Innovation for Climate Action

5G Leadership Award

Since 2009, we’ve invested US$4 billion in 5G R&D and, in 2018, we unveiled our E2E 5G capabilities, based on which GSMA honored us with the 5G leadership award.

Including 47 contracts in Europe, we’ve signed a total 91 contracts for 5G deployment to date – the most in the world. Huawei also holds the world’s highest number of ETSI-defined 5G basic patents and 3GPP-defined standard 5G patents. Underpinning this lead is close technical cooperation with industry organizations, research institutes, and universities. With the support of 20 research centers, hundreds of 5G global industry experts, and thousands of developers, we’ve made breakthroughs in key 5G technologies, including:

• Massive MIMO
• New materials
• Heat dissipation and energy-saving solutions
• 5G Blade AAU, the industry’s only full series of ultra-broadband radio product that supports 400 MHz bandwidth
• Super Uplink
• Mobile network automatic driving engine

5G will be a game-changer for individuals, businesses, and industries, with the latest wireless generation bringing with it a host of new applications and business models. We’re proud to be at the forefront of the 5G ecosystem.

Tech of the Future Award

Huawei’s Atlas 900 AI cluster – the world’s fastest AI training cluster – took home GSMA’s future tech award thanks to its world-leading AI computing power, advanced heat dissipation technology, and best-in-class cluster network.

Providing the same computing power as 500,000 PCs, the Atlas 900 combines thousands of Huawei Ascend 910 AI processors. In the ResNet-50 model training benchmark test, the Atlas 900 completed training in 59.8 seconds, 10 seconds faster than the nearest competitor, making it the only product in existence that can complete the test in under a minute.

To prevent overheating, the Atlas 900 features an industry-leading heat dissipation system in the shape of a hybrid liquid cooling solution, with a cooling ratio exceeding 95% and cabinet-level enclosed adiabatic (heat transfer) technology. The solution approaches the optimum power usage effectiveness (PUE) for data centers of 1.0 – a single cabinet equipped with the Atlas 900 can provide heat dissipation of up to 50 kW, achieving a PUE of below 1.1. The solution is also highly space efficient, cutting the equipment footprint by 79% compared with an 8 kW cabinet.

Able to handle models that previously took months to train in a matter of seconds, the Atlas 900 is a powerhouse of AI computing that will bring new possibilities to different fields of scientific research and business innovation. The video below is an example of the work we’re doing with the Shanghai Astronomical Observatory and the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) Organization to process vast amounts of data.

Best Mobile Innovation for Work

With 20-plus years supporting the aviation industry, Huawei has amassed a considerable experience in the technologies, trends, and needs of this industry. GSMA awarded China Eastern Airlines, China Unicom, and Huawei the mobile innovation award for work in recognition of the world’s first 5G smart travel solution, which we deployed in China’s Beijing Daxing International Airport.

Serving 350,000 passengers a day, China Eastern Airlines is the world’s seventh largest airline. In September 2019, Huawei and its partners launched an integrated smart travel solution based on 5G, AI, and cloud to cope with increasing passenger numbers and transform the operating and user experience for the airline.

The solution features innovations in 5G indoor coverage and 5G applications, and crucially showcases the commercial value of 5G. New services include one-time facial recognition, an app that provides personalized information services, and end-to-end luggage management.

Faster, more efficient, and scenario-specific, the solution is poised to redefine air travel.

Best Mobile Innovation for Smart Cities

GSMA granted this award to China Mobile Zhejiang and Huawei in recognition of the partners’ NB-IoT Smart Fire Control solution, which comprises 1.38 million smoke detectors. Through a cellular NB-IoT connection with no cabling, these detectors feed into a fire monitoring platform, providing smart notifications and E2E visibility linked to an app.

The solution has already proven instrumental in preventing several fires from spreading, including one in a wood factory and another in a warehouse, both in Zhejiang, which would have risked lives and potentially cost millions of dollars in lost inventory and equipment. Early alerts transmitted from smoke detectors to the fire center enabled an early response in both cases. 

As well as realizing fast emergency response, the scalable solution has yielded a new revenue source for Zhejiang Mobile. The operator has expanded its business scope from connections to reselling terminals, running a cloud platform, and service integration.

Best Mobile Innovation for Climate Action

Huawei’s PowerStar solution was honored with the climate action GLOMO award. PowerStar enables coordinated network-wide energy-saving across radio access technologies (RATs), equipment, and sites through an AI-powered platform.

Already deployed in more than 100,000 sites in more than 20 commercial networks around the world, PowerStar was developed in response to growing network complexity due to new RATs and bands designed to improve mobile network deployment.

This solution can help operators meet energy-saving goals without compromising network performance and user experience. Given that there will be a predicted 6.5 million 5G sites by 2025, we estimate that PowerStar will cut carbon dioxide emissions by 43 million tons – the equivalent of 55 billion kilowatts of electricity or 380 million newly planted trees.

While GSMA’s GLOMO awards are a roll call of the leaders of the mobile industry, it’s not just that we’re at the cutting-edge of 5G and AI that’s noteworthy for me. Our success stories are also stories of the partnerships that bring our innovations to life; they’re stories of creating green technologies that goes beyond words to make a real difference to the planet.

Read more about how Huawei partners with universities and also about our green 5G solutions. 

Disclaimer: Any views and/or opinions expressed in this post by individual authors or contributors are their personal views and/or opinions and do not necessarily reflect the views and/or opinions of Huawei Technologies.