As a pioneer in the 5G New Calling market with more than 10 million subscribers since launch in 2023, China Mobile has big plans to expand the service offering and is pushing for further global support as part of the GSMA 5G New Calling Task Force.

In an interview with Mobile World Live at Huawei’s WinWin Live extended reality studio at MWC Shanghai 2024, Wei Chenguang, Deputy General Manager of China MobileResearch Institute and Chair of GSMA 5G New Calling Task Force (GSMA 5GNCTF), outlined how far the group has come since setting up the task force at MWC Barcelona 2023.

“This group is the first GSMA board-level workgroup led by Chinese carriers. Currently, it has 15 members from carriers, terminal providers, and network device vendors,” explained Ms Wei.

“The group shares information with global partners of the New Calling industry, organises the top-level design for call services and promotes the construction and improvement of end-to-end standards and industry chains, so to build a global industry ecosystem.” Ms Wei described the New Calling industry as “progressing smoothly,”

What is 5G New Calling?

5G New Calling is an enhanced mobile voice/video service that leverages 5G networks (and 5G-Advanced in the future) and the IMS data channel to improve, or even transform, the user experience of voice/video calls. The superior network capabilities enabled by 5G standalone networks (in terms of bandwidth, speed, latency and overall network performance), compared to previous 4G networks, allow for a better provision of HD and immersive audio and video communications, in addition to interactive calling capabilities.

“The core development direction of New Calling is to make calls more interesting, more content-driven, and more useful,” explained George Gao, President of Huawei Cloud Core Network Product Line, during the WinWin Live interview.

“We want to bring the dialer backusers’ habits through easy-to-use and fun services. 5G’s intelligence makes all this possible and will accelerate its implementation. We are committed to helping transform call services from minute-based operations to content-based operations.”

Gao explained that Huawei has worked with China Mobile on features like Fun Calling, Speech-to-Text Conversion, Visualized Voice Calling, and Auto Transcription. The aim is to make calls more interesting, content-driven, and useful, he noted.

“This year, we go deeperintelligence by improving the overall intelligent calling experience. We have introduced multimodal communication capabilities to support voice-to-text, voice-to-picture, and voice-to-digital human conversion, as well as real-time switching between modes such as gestures and animations,” he explained.

The network giant has also introduced real-time multi-lingual interpretation, real-time action capture and identification, voice-driven digital avatar, and other new atomic capabilities. Based on this, in May this year, Huawei and China Mobile Jiangsu took the lead in releasing new functions including Enhanced Visualized Voice Calling, Idol Calling, Intelligent Customer Service, and Avatar Calling.

“These features provide users with upgraded intelligent call experiences,” explained Gao. “For example, the avatar calling function uses the users’ photos to generate digital humans of different styles based on their facial features. During a call, a digital human is displayed on the screen with expressions and lip movements synchronous to the user’s voice.”

Gao highlighted how avatar calling brings familiar yet refreshing feelings to users, creates pleasant surprises, and makes every phone call full of expectations, greatly improving the calling experience.

Expanding early growth

So after an encouraging start, how can the 5G New Calling market expand?

Ms Wei explained that the GSMA 5GNCTF is pushing for the standardisation of New Calling, formulating specifications for open-source SDKs, and conducting research on New Calling services and business models.

In addition, the terminal and chip industries need to strengthen their support, urged Ms Wei. “Terminals are key to New Calling. Interactive calls require the support from chips and terminals. We will continue to deepen our cooperation to promote the maturity of the terminal industry.”

Ms Wei is able to use her experience with China Mobile’s pioneering 5G New Calling launch to help shape wider industry development of the technology.

“We’ve developed quality test tools for New Calling services. We are constantly improving the service experience for our users, and winning recognition from them.

“And in building the 5G New Calling industry ecosystem, we promote open cooperation in various models by introducing AI capabilities from external partners.”

Huawei’s George Gao revealed the network specialist will move forward in three key directions.

“The first is to extend the services to help enterprises and more third-party partners join the New Calling platform to create more value and bring more applications.

“The second is to focus on the interactive capabilities of the Data Channel-native mobile phones, so users can complete transactions during calls in a closed-loop manner.

“The third is to combine the call entry with the AI agent, and build intelligent call assistants that understand you and help you”.

GSMA Intelligence support

It’s an approach that resonates with analysis from GSMA Intelligence. A recent research report by the analyst firm noted: “While China is a big market (nearly 1 billion 5G connections expected by the end of 2024), a wider acceptance of 5G New Calling is needed to make the service a truly global story. Network vendors play a key role in promoting developments globally. Showcasing how early adopters such as China Mobile are leveraging the technology to upsell digital services would be a good start (as some Chinese vendors are already doing). Building a wider ecosystem is essential, as is integrating AI technology within 5G New Calling features.”

Both Ms Wei and George Gao agreed that collaboration will be key to growing the 5G New Calling market, particularly as we approach the 5G-Advanced era.

“We hope to gather all parties in the industry to jointly promote application innovation of 5G New Calling: working together to better our products, expanding the ecosystem, and promoting industry cooperation are key to success,” said Ms Wei.

“We look forward to working with global industries, and welcome more membersthe GSMA 5GNCTF, to jointly build a mutually beneficial industry ecosystem. Together we will usher in more prosperity for 5G New Calling.”

It was a feeling echoed by Huawei’s Gao in his closing interview statement: “We look forward to working with more friends in the industry for more high-value scenarios and apps to move towards a prosperous future of New Calling.”