While attending the Global MBB Forum (MBBF) Top Talk Summit 2025, held under the theme ‘5G-A Leads Mobile AI Era,’ China Mobile's Executive Vice President, Li Huidi, delivered a keynote speech titled ‘AI+NETWORK, Pioneering the Digital-Intelligent Future.’
Li Huidi, Executive Vice President of China Mobile, speaking at the summit
AI is gaining unrivalled momentum worldwide, profoundly reshaping telecom networks, which are the essential infrastructure for society. According to Li, AI is driving an exponential surge of data in networks, propelling their growth to unprecedented levels. At the same time, AI has become an important topic around telecom network innovation, as the entire telecom world is focusing on AI-native networks, aiming to bring AI to core processes.
Positioning itself as a world-class information service and tech innovation enterprise in digital technology and information services, China Mobile is unleashing its ‘AI+NETWORK’ innovation program to promote high-quality and sustainable development. Remarkable progress has been made, which Li explained, in three areas. First, leading information infrastructure. China Mobile has the world's largest 5G and fiber broadband networks and fully cloud-based 4G/5G converged core networks, in addition to rapidly growing computing power. This leading information infrastructure underpins digital-intelligent transformation across industries. Second, innovation-enabled information service systems. As an innovation-guided firm, China Mobile has come a long way in translating innovation into differentiated business competitiveness, especially in 5G-Advanced. For example, the company has 90,000 5G-Advanced 3CC CA cells and 450,000 RedCap sites and is also the first operator to bring Network Data Analytics Function (NWDAF) to 5G-Advanced for experience assurance. Its wireless AI applications are making a huge difference across its networks to enhance user experience. Third, advancing the digital-intelligent transformation of network O&M through autonomous networks (ANs). China Mobile is implementing ANs with the following approach: driven by value, taking process optimization as the entry point, automation as the foundation, AI technology as the innovation engine, and data as the new production factor. They are committed to building an end-to-end, fully-automated, digital-intelligent operations pipeline. Currently, several high-value scenarios, such as service provisioning and change monitoring, have already reached AN L4, enabling low-cost, highly efficient network operations and continuously leading industry development.
Li highlighted two special achievements in his speech, which focused on AI-native mobile networks to enable tiered quality guarantee and optimization automation and autonomous networks for fully-connected factories and connected vehicles.
The innovation and development towards a digital-intelligent future cannot be achieved without global collaboration. Regarding this, Li put forward two proposals. First, end-to-end promotion is necessary for autonomous networks and 5G-Advanced. Li believes this will help amplify the impact of the telecom industry across production, everyday life, and governance. Second, close collaboration with both standards and industry organizations is key to improving AI governance in telecoms. By adding intelligence to ICT networks, the telecom industry contributes to ‘AI for good.’
At the summit, China Mobile, alongside the GSMA, TM Forum, the GSA, and Huawei, unveiled eight major use cases of L4 autonomous networks and five innovation achievements of 5G-Advanced based on its AI+NETWORK innovation program.
Executive Vice President of China Mobile, Li Huidi; Huawei’s Corporate Senior Vice President, President of ICT Sales & Service, Li Peng; and representatives from TM Forum; the GSMA; and the GSA posing for the ‘AI+NETWORK’ achievements ceremony
With the world's largest telecom networks and user base, China Mobile first started digital-intelligent transformation in the telecom industry back in 2019. Its goal was to promote the converged innovation of networks and AI towards high-level autonomous networks. This pioneering exploration has now reaped fruitful results, delivering significant improvements in its quality, efficiency, and business returns. Now, it has become the first network operator to bring L4 autonomous networks to eight key scenarios, with four focusing on ToB service provisioning and the others on network change monitoring.
L4 network autonomy is available for ToB service provisioning, including 5G private network, cloud private line, data private line, and internet private lines. AI makes delivery faster and more agile for these services by enabling end-to-end automation to completely replace manual operations and improving the accuracy of dumb resource identification. Now, a service can be provisioned in hours and 95% of resource allocation can be successfully completed with a single operation. In addition, AI is making installation, maintenance, and quality inspection more efficient by improving installation and geo-fencing recognition. Now, 99% of installation tasks can be finished with a single site visit.
L4 network autonomy is also supported for monitoring changes across core networks, network clouds, transport networks, and IP networks to ensure secure network operations. End-to-end automation is realized for impact analysis and operation monitoring. Digital twins are introduced to make network change solutions visualized, customizable, and pre-verifiable to ensure zero change-caused faults. AI big data analysis is supported for comprehensive network change monitoring tasks, allowing faults to be detected in seconds and located in minutes.
China Mobile has been making great efforts to promote the technology and network development of 5G-Advanced. A number of achievements have been made to accelerate its commercial development:
- Networks Are Intelligent: New intelligent NEs, like NWDAF and Access and Mobility Policy Control Function (AM-PCF) are first introduced to enable intelligent control functionality within core networks. The intelligent control functionality includes real-time service recognition, experience awareness, comprehensive decision-making, and backward experience feedback. This sets the stage for dynamic differentiated experience assurance, including user-specific icon display and experience assurance feedback. An intelligent converged architecture has been developed for 5G base stations to support intelligent service-based awareness and real-time policy adjustment, which is widely deemed essential for user-specific experience guarantee across diverse scenarios as well as intelligent network optimization and energy saving.
- Downlink 3CC CA Increases Downlink Peak Speed to 5 Gbps: China Mobile has more than 90,000 3CC CA cells in China, preferentially deployed across university campuses, business centers, and other important capacity-demanding settings. This has helped promote new services such as naked-eye 3D, HD video, and cloud gaming.
- Accelerating Progress is Achieved for RedCap: As a 5G-based, lightweight IoT technology, RedCap can reduce device complexity by 60%. This has stimulated its broad adoption in eight industries, like security and surveillance. China Mobile has built 450,000 RedCap sites across 337 cities in China to supercharge more than 160 benchmark cases.
- Integrated Communications and Sensing is Significantly Improved: The coverage has been extended to the low-altitude space below 300 m for communications and sensing. With a sensing precision of 10 to 25 m, 43 demonstration projects have been developed to give a huge boost to the low-altitude economy.
- Passive IoT is Scaling Up: End-to-end solutions have been developed to support more than 20 typical applications, such as stocktaking and e-bike entry detection, facilitating the full-process digital and intelligent management of all elements across industries.
China Mobile has been actively promoting 5G-Advanced development, and it has made remarkable progress, from technology innovation to commercial expansion. It has also been advancing digital and intelligent network O&M transformation based on network autonomy. Looking ahead, the company will continue to work with the entire industry ecosystem to stimulate and scale up the converged development of 5G-Advanced and AI to inject new vitality into the digital economy.
