Ten technology trends in the communications industry

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The surging AI wave is not only the main theme of current industrial technological innovation, but also contains huge certainties and uncertainties. The information and communication industry is actively embracing AI, and is firmly stepping into the AI arena of the digital era as a builder of infrastructure, an enabler of model applications, and an innovator of information services.

2025 is a key year for the layout of the "15th Five-Year Plan". In the tide of certainty and uncertainty, which technologies will become a powerful force in shaping the business landscape? What innovations will lead to profound changes in the market pattern?

At the Communication New Year's Eve Think Tank on December 18, 2024 - 2024 Communication Industry Conference and the 19th Communication Technology Annual Conference, based on the annual technology trend nominations of many CTOs, front-line leaders and senior experts in the industry, Xin Pengjun, the editor-in-chief of the "Communication Industry Newspaper" all-media, released the "Top Ten Technology Trends in the Communication Industry in 2025" in the form of "digital people", which has attracted widespread attention in the industry.

Technology is the fundamental driving force for the development of the communication industry. Understanding technology and insight into technology have always been the key factors for good industrial development and corporate advancement. In order to better present the true understanding and original insight of industry experts on the annual judgment, the "Communication Industry Newspaper" all-media has appropriately edited the "Top Ten Technology Trends in the Communication Industry in 2025" of some experts and published them for readers to help the industry and enterprises make annual decisions and judgments.

This issue publishes the "Nomination of Top Ten Technology Trends in the Communications Industry in 2025" by Ms. Huang Yuhong, a senior industry expert and president of China Mobile Research Institute.

5G-A technology has commercial capabilities

5G-A is moving towards large-scale scenario applications

The development of 5G-A in 2025 will focus on the in-depth application of key technologies and the comprehensive construction of the industrial ecosystem, helping 5G-A move towards large-scale scenario applications. After large-scale pilot verification and industrial development in 2024, 5G-A technical solutions are becoming more mature and the industrial ecosystem is becoming more perfect. 5G-A key technologies such as network intelligence, passive Internet of Things, inter-sensory integration, ATG, and determinism have commercial capabilities. With the maturity of 5G-A technology and the increase in the scale of network deployment, more new business scenarios and application models based on 5G-A are expected to appear in 2025, 5G-A will be further integrated with various industries, and the business model will be further improved, opening up new value space.

6G opens the first year of standardization

From the technical pre-research stage to the industrialization stage

3GPP international industry organization launched the first 6G standard project, opening the first year of 6G standardization. In September 2024, at the 3GPP (Third Generation Partnership Project) meeting held in Australia, the world's first 6G standard project "6G scenario use cases and requirements" research was officially launched, marking the official transition of 6G from the technical pre-research stage to the standardization stage. 2025 will usher in the first year of 6G standardization, which will have an important impact on the development of global 6G.

The commercial process of satellite-ground integration is accelerating

Mobile phone direct connection to satellite is going deeper and more practical

With the acceleration of the commercialization process of mobile phone direct connection to satellite constellations such as Starlink and AST, the global satellite and ground industries will use the mobile phone direct connection to satellite business capabilities as a breakthrough point to work together to accelerate the technical and end-to-end industry maturity of 3GPP communication protocols, satellite-ground integrated networking, satellite-ground frequency sharing and other key capabilities of the integrated network of the sky and the earth, and work together to create a prosperous ecosystem of the integrated sky and the earth with "deep integration of the sky and the earth".

Fully-dispatched Ethernet GSE, omnidirectional intelligent interconnection OISA "strengthen computing with the network"

Computing power natively "breaks through the silo", and the intelligent computing cluster moves from "10,000 cards" to "100,000 cards"

The step-by-step development of artificial intelligence puts forward higher requirements for intelligent computing power. The "China Solution" of the new intelligent computing center is accelerating its implementation. The omnidirectional texture interconnection OISA creates a large-scale GPU peer-to-peer interconnection protocol to build an interconnection capability between GPU cards with excellent performance, strong scalability, and open sharing; the fully-dispatched Ethernet GSE breaks through the performance bottleneck of lossless Ethernet and comprehensively improves the communication performance between intelligent computing nodes; computing power native enables intelligent computing applications to "develop once and migrate across cores", creating a full "core" path for the integrated development of intelligent computing ecology led by software. my country's intelligent computing center will continue to break through the bottlenecks and difficulties of interconnection between cards, between machines, and ecological intercommunication, and intelligent computing clusters will move from "10,000 cards" to the "100,000 cards" era.

400G is moving towards the Tbit level of all-optical network

Hollow-core fiber is accelerating towards industrialization

The 400G all-optical backbone network will be put into large-scale commercial use in 2024. 1.6T is expected to become the intergenerational technology of the next-generation backbone network. ITU-T has started the research and formulation of B1T electrical layer standards. Key technology research such as Tbit-level ultra-high-speed optical tube core and multi-band ultra-wide spectrum optical layer infrastructure has also become the focus of industry attention. Facing the two major physical bottlenecks of "nonlinear Shannon capacity limit" and "transmission delay limit" of existing solid-core optical fibers, anti-resonant hollow-core optical fibers are subversively based on a new structural light-guiding mechanism, with nonlinear effects reduced by 3 orders of magnitude and transmission delay reduced by more than 30%. In 25 years, it is expected to further solve the engineering deployment problems such as large-scale preparation of optical fibers and CO2 absorption, ushering in an accelerated period for the hollow-core optical fiber and transmission system industry to move from technical prototypes to industrialization.

Multimodal fusion and intelligent agent collaborative upgrade

Communication opens a new stage of all-factor resource and AI fusion operation

Artificial intelligence technology will be upgraded around multimodal fusion and intelligent agent collaboration to promote the reshaping of business models. Big model technology continues to evolve, with cross-modal understanding and generation capabilities, stronger complex reasoning capabilities and general problem-solving capabilities. The all-modal multi-task unified learning framework can process signal data from more modes such as sensors and radars, and achieve more efficient network perception, optimization and service innovation. As a technical form of autonomous decision-making and planning, the intelligent agent will deeply collaborate with the big model, flexibly respond to complex scenario tasks, and have adaptive learning and iterative upgrade capabilities. At the same time, the operation model of the communications industry has changed from a single AI capability supply to the fusion operation of all-factor resources and AI applications, and the business empowerment model has evolved from traditional external support to endogenous innovation, and industrial cooperation has accelerated towards systematic collaborative innovation. The communications industry driven by AI will achieve a deep integration of technology, business and ecology, and open a new stage of intelligent development.

Chinese standards for data infrastructure gradually reach consensus

Integrated development of three technologies: data, computing network, and AI

In 2024, the data factor market will begin to accelerate, and data infrastructure will promote data services for thousands of industries, deeply integrate into social production and life, and promote the technical foundation for the marketization of data factors. In 2025, the research and construction of data infrastructure technology systems and standards will accelerate, and data circulation and utilization technologies and standards, enhanced data space technologies and standards, data infrastructure interconnection technologies and standards, and data cross-domain circulation governance and regulatory system technologies and standards will become the key to promoting the industrialization of data infrastructure. With infrastructure standardization as the driving force and link, the integration of three major technologies, data, computing network, and AI, is realized: first, the integration of multiple technical routes for data circulation (such as digital network, data space, blockchain, etc.) is realized to break the "technical island"; second, the integration of data circulation and computing network technology is realized, and an efficient and flexible data circulation network is established through collaborative perception and scheduling of digital computing; third, the integration of data circulation and AI big model technology is realized to achieve "two-way empowerment". Data circulation provides cross-domain and cross-industry "trusted data aggregation" for AI big model training and promotion, and AI provides intelligent services and guarantees for data circulation.

Low-altitude intelligent network infrastructure construction is accelerated

The integrated capabilities of "communication, guidance, sensing, management, and intelligence" are initially revealed

The new information infrastructure with low-altitude intelligent network as the core is the key foundation for coordinating the high-quality development and high-level safety of the low-altitude economy. With the increasing activity of low-altitude flight activities and the increasing richness of low-altitude business applications, beyond-visual-range flight operations, high-frequency flight activities, diversified flight equipment, and complex flight environments have put forward new requirements for the communication reliability, navigation accuracy, comprehensive supervision, and operational efficiency of the network. Facing the large-scale development needs of networking, digitalization, and intelligence, creating an integrated low-altitude intelligent network of "communication, guidance, sensing, management, and intelligence" is an inevitable trend in the development of future technology.

Embodied intelligence leads general artificial intelligence research to a new stage

Promote the accelerated development of the robotics industry

Embodied intelligence will promote the deep integration of large model technology and the robotics industry, break through the training data bottleneck and product form limitations of traditional AI models, improve the environmental adaptability and task execution capabilities of robots, and help the standardization and large-scale development of the robotics industry in the fields of intelligent manufacturing, home care, education and scientific research, and public services. At the same time, embodied intelligence will promote collaborative innovation in multiple disciplines such as computer science, cognitive science, and control, provide a new paradigm with more practical significance for AI research, and lead general artificial intelligence to a more generalized and flexible future.

Quantum error correction promotes the improvement of quantum computing performance

Quantum secure communication and post-quantum cryptography technology accelerate commercialization

With the continuous development of quantum information technology. In quantum computing, with the centenary of quantum mechanics, quantum computing will achieve many breakthroughs. Quantum error correction promotes the quantum computer to shift from physical bits to logical bits, improves the hardware system integration, and improves computing stability and reliability. General computing, intelligent computing, supercomputing, and quantitative computing are accelerating integration, and the construction of new infrastructure such as quantum data centers has started. Quantum cloud platform resources are gradually enriched, the attention to quantum artificial intelligence is heating up, and the number of scientific research-level cases and quantum superiority solutions has increased. Quantum-classical hybrid algorithms will be more widely piloted in practice. In terms of quantum communication, network security is rapidly developing in the direction of quantum resistance, and quantum secure communication and post-quantum cryptographic technology are accelerating their application. First, the commercialization of quantum secure communication is accelerating, and a series of products have been formed in terms of calls, offices, dedicated lines, and the Internet of Things, which will widely empower users in various industries in the future; second, the application of post-quantum cryptographic algorithms has become an inevitable trend in the evolution of future networks and applications. Domestic post-quantum algorithms will be selected, promoted, and fully updated and replaced.