The United Arab Emirates (UAE) has become one of the leading countries in 5G innovation. At the Samena Summit in May, it set out a national objective to quickly roll out 5G-Advanced. With just two mobile network operators in the country — du and e& — each has sizeable amounts of spectrum, which helps 5G performance to shine. This has been especially beneficial to du, which has enthusiastic plans for new 5G technologies.
Now du is building a modern network to target a range of advanced services and user segments. At Mobile Broadband Forum 2024, Hasan Alshemeili, Head of Infra Technology Planning at du, explained these objectives. For gamers, the target is a stable end-to-end latency of 20 ms. And, for supporting AI agents conversing with humans, du’s goal is real-time interactions on the network of under 50 ms.
The company plans to monetize its network based on what it calls “experience monetization” on service value. This will succeed tariff pricing differentiation on resource value or quantity-based pricing on traditional measures such data traffic volume or voice duration. So, for example, du will move to speed-based packages with different download speed tiers, or offer a livestreaming tier for a differentiated uplink experience, or priority levels for hot spot acceleration.
These tariff plans for 5G-Advanced and experience tiering build on du’s history of moving early with 5G deployment. Following du’s initial launch of 5G in 2019 — the same year as the earliest operators anywhere in the world — it debuted 5G standalone in 2023. Standalone is a foundational technology that removes dependency on 4G, and is a necessary step before moving ahead with 5G Reduced Capability (RedCap) or 5G-Advanced. With 5G standalone the amount of 5G spectrum available becomes critical, because a device can no longer use 4G spectrum bands alongside 5G, as they can with 5G non-standalone.
Its 5G network has also expanded quickly. In 2020, du claimed 72% population coverage for its 5G network. This reached 95% in 2022 and 98.5% in 2023. This means that as du expands the performance of its network with 5G standalone and 5G-Advanced, the service will be available to almost everyone in the UAE. This extensive coverage is now the dominant technology, with two-thirds of mobile data traffic now on 5G, rather than older network generations.
Since 2022, du has used two 5G carriers and in 2023 saw 60% of its network traffic flow across 5G as a result, which is more than the sum of traffic carried on 3G and 4G together. But now the operator plans to deploy three 5G carrier aggregation, using a total of 300 MHz of spectrum, to boost 5G network capacity and users’ speeds.
Normally, bands above 3 GHz have worse indoor penetration than lower frequency bands owing to the physics of the propagation of different frequencies — higher bands tend to be absorbed more by the materials used in building construction than lower bands do. However, the use of internal 5G antennas avoids this problem and ensures a strong signal. The indoor network equipment used also supports mmWave, which means that when du needs further capacity, it has an upgrade path available that can utilize up to 1.6 GHz of mmWave spectrum, which is far greater than the total available sub-6 GHz spectrum.
Outdoors, in the live network, du has been deploying large antenna array technology, which the operator believes has reduced power consumption by 30%. This deployment uses units with 384 antenna elements, up from traditional 192-element designs. These units are designed to maximize capacity efficiently and simplify site construction by adding less weight than older designs would have done if they were available with a similar number of antenna elements.
Standalone is a stepping stone to new capabilities such as RedCap, which requires both 5G standalone and a network operating with 3GPP Release 17 or better. It offers a low-cost and energy-efficient migration from older 4G technologies while enabling internet of things and fixed wireless access devices to use the new high-capacity 5G spectrum bands.
RedCap also offers further advantages for even more devices with low network demands with Release 18. In the UAE, du has announced its intention to launch Release 18 in thousands of sites in main cities in 2024.
The operator’s 5G-Advanced Innovation Centre will test new technologies and uses for 5G, including extended reality in 24K resolution, improved fixed wireless access services, private 5G networks and holographic communications. The operator plans to offer differentiated services using network slicing.
Such innovations will help du achieve its commercial objectives, including increasing its share of the fixed wireless access market from 34% — which it believes it currently has — to 40% within three years. This goal builds on previous efforts to increase its share of home broadband connections from just 16% in 2019. This growth in market share illustrates the importance of du’s 5G network roll-out and investments in supporting its home broadband strategy.
Although holographic images may seem little different from the 3D video we’ve seen for many years, they’re very different in their demands on a network. To deliver a true 3D video image that can be viewed from any angle, unlike the single viewpoint of conventional 3D, they need to capture and then transmit a volumetric 3D image. This needs exponentially more data and much higher-capacity networks, which is why it is of particular interest in the context of 5G-Advanced.
Using 5G-Advanced and the capabilities of its 5G core network, du plans to explore offering different quality of service levels to different users. For example, by offering premium users a guarantee of a better network experience. The operator also plans to use the better network performance as a foundation for AI. The network will enable more-responsive access to cloud-based AI and a more reliable connection between the AI on user devices that understands private information and the cloud AI needed for more-complicated models trained on vast world data sets.
AI used within the network also helps to reduce power consumption. With Huawei’s iPowerStar AI solution now deployed on 148 sites, du reports that it has achieved 4% power saving per day by intelligently lowering energy used at quiet times to match lower data consumption.
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