The New Calling Industry Development Roundtable Meeting, hosted by GSMA 5G New Calling Task Force (5GNCTF), supported by China Mobile and Huawei, was held during MWC Shanghai 2024. This roundtable gathered over 70 experts from more than 30 organizations, operators, network equipment vendors, chipset vendors, terminal providers, and other industry stakeholders. They extensively deliberated on various aspects of New Calling, covering business practices, service innovation, network deployment and evolution, terminal support and promotion, and industry cooperation. The goal was to accelerate the establishment of a globally unified New Calling ecosystem and foster industry prosperity.
Mark Cornall, GSMA Technical Director, chaired this roundtable.
Wei Chenguang, Chair of the GSMA 5G New Calling Task Force and Vice President of China Mobile Research Institute, delivered a welcome speech. She outlined the Task Force's work progress, highlighted achievements, and presented the upcoming key work plan. According to Wei Chenguang, the GSMA 5G New Calling Task Force serves as a platform for global New Calling industry partners to exchange information. It aims to capture gaps in 5G New Calling standards and encourages members to contribute to SDOs to build a comprehensive New Calling standards system. 5GNCTF also aims to foster the maturity of the industry chain, and promotes the cooperation between industry partners to achieve a unified global ecosystem. In the past year since the establishment of 5GNCTF, the 5GNCTF has garnered participation from 15 companies, including operators, terminal providers, and network device vendors. Furthermore, the 5GNCTF recommended developing a New Calling open-source SDKs, started to study the service and business aspects of 5G New Calling services, and the members of the Task Force successfully proposed multiple New Calling Standardization work items in different SDOs/WGs.
Issam Toufik, 3GPP Mobile Competence Centre Director and ETSI CTO, discussed the progress of 3GPP standards. According to him, 3GPP Release 18 has been finalized, and the current standards enable operators to begin commercial deployment of New Calling networks. Additionally, 3GPP Release 19 focuses on enhancing inter-operator interworking and roaming.
China Mobile, a pioneer and leader in the 5G New Calling industry, placed significant emphasis on fostering an open and unified global ecosystem. Chen Yuancheng, Deputy General Manager of Marketing Department of China Mobile Internet Company, shared their experiences by combining aspects such as the design of New Calling services, practical use cases, and development of network capabilities. Furthermore, they highlighted their achievements in current commercial services and expressed their anticipation for future service innovation and development plans. This valuable sharing provides useful insights for global operators and the industry.
Huawei, a joint innovator of New Calling and a core network provider, has teamed up with partners to innovate New Calling services. Leo Ma, Vice President of Huawei Cloud Core Network Product Line, attended the meeting and shared Huawei's practices in assisting global operators in commercializing the New Calling network and innovating new business models. He stated that Huawei has helped China Mobile deploy the world's first New Calling network and put multiple services into commercial use. In addition, Huawei has analyzed the characteristics and status quo of various markets in Middle East, Latin America, and Asia Pacific, and carried out joint researches, Proof of Concept (POC) tests, and commercial network deployments with the leading operator in each region. Chen Haiyong, President of CS&IMS Domain, Huawei Cloud Core Network Product Line, gave a speech themed "AI Empowered Network Enables Service Innovation" at the meeting. He said that AI is empowering New Calling, enabling multi-modal communications, and rebuilding the intelligent service entry. New Calling business success requires powerful AI and network computing capabilities on the voice network, open calling capabilities to flourish the industry ecosystem, and the New Calling operations and management platform.
Walter Zielinski, Chair of the GSMA New Calling Terminal API Working Group and Vice Chair of the GSMA Networks Working Group, reviewed GSMA's work on the formulation of the New Calling standards and introduced the latest achievements. Walter said that GSMA has completed the formulation of the first version of New Calling terminal API specification and plans to complete the formulation of the terminal test specification by the end of this year. These specifications will facilitate the construction of the New Calling mini-app ecosystem and ensure the interworking of New Calling services between different operators as well as different terminals, which will help enhance the New Calling industry's growth and invigorate application development.
Paulo Sousa, CTO of WIT Software (a Portuguese company and a leading provider of New Calling terminal solutions in Europe) shared the design ideas and practice cases of WIT Software's New Calling terminal SDK, providing valuable experience for New Calling terminal and application development.
Experts from organizations and companies such as Alibaba, CAICT, China Broadnet, China Telecom, Deutsche Telekom AG, FONTDO, informa, KDDI, MediaTek, Omdia, OPPO, Orange, Qualcomm, Samsung, stc, Telefonica, UNISOC, vivo, Xiaomi and ZTE, engaged in thorough discussions on multiple issues, including application innovation, business model transformation, and network and terminal standards enhancement. They concluded that along with technology advancements and market changes, communications standards require constant updates to meet users' ever-changing needs. Moreover, the experts shared their experience and practices in promoting the services and standards, and provided valuable suggestions on how to enhance cross-sector collaboration, promote technological innovation, and upgrade the industry. They believed that, with the concerted efforts of all industry partners, 5G New Calling will revolutionize calling services and business models, and breathe life into the communications industry.