China Unicom and Huawei boost 5G-A uplinks for over 10,000 sites in Beijing

Details: John Tanner; Category: Wireless Networks; 20 July 2026; 1319 views

China Unicom Beijing and Huawei say they have launched what they claim is the world’s largest deployment of Huawei’s “GigaUplink” technology in a 5G-Advanced network.

The GigaUplink solution – which provides continuous coverage of 100 MHz worth of uplink spectrum – has been deployed in over 10,000 Unicom base stations in key areas across Beijing.

In a statement issued Thursday, Huawei said that a live drive test of the network, conducted along a 34-km route, demonstrated a 100 MHz uplink effective ratio of 83%, with the proportion of weak points at the cell edge (benchmarked at less than 20 Mbps) at just 0.1%.

The test also demonstrated a peak uplink rate of 1 Gbps, an average uplink rate of 397 Mbps, and a 72% proportion of “ultimate uplink experience” (which in this case means uplink speeds over 300 Mbps).

China Unicom leveraged Huawei’s Supplementary Uplink (SUL) solution to use aggregated 3.5 GHz and 2.1 GHz spectrum to support the uplinks during the test drive. Uplink-intensive apps tested during the demo included AI glasses, communication between AI-enabled phones and AI agents, and real-time transmission of content generated by smart cameras for AI analysis in the cloud.

China Unicom and Huawei demonstrated the same GigaUplink technology in April this year at the Beijing E Beijing E-Town Half-Marathon and Humanoid Robot Half-Marathon, where humans and robots competed with each other. Unicom deployed GigaUplink tech along the route to connect not only the robots, but also spectators and media who were livestreaming and uploading video clips of the race.

At last month’s MWC Shanghai 2026 event, agentic AI and AI tokens were hot topics, particularly among Chinese telcos and vendors like Huawei who emphasised the importance of providing faster uplinks via 5G-A to support AI-powered services.

Ookla made a similar point in a report earlier this month, noting that most 5G networks are engineered for fast, low-latency downlinks, not uplinks, which limits their ability to support agentic AI. The mobile industry has been banking on 5G-A to address this, but 5G-A has only been commercially launched by 11 operators around the world as of April 2026, according to the Global mobile Suppliers Association (GSA).

“New services such as AI phones, AI glasses, smart robots, industrial vision and low-altitude applications are continuously emerging, profoundly changing network connection objects and business models,” said China Unicom senior VP Miao Shouye in a statement. “Large uplink capabilities are becoming an essential foundation for supporting real-time interaction in the AI era, enabling the network to better connect, perceive, and serve the real world.”

David Li, president of Huawei's Wireless TDD product line, said the vendor “will continue to innovate in technological directions such as multi-band pooling, uplink enhancement, and multi-dimensional coordination.”