Calling services are the cornerstone of operators’ business and offer indispensable and unique social values. Today, phone calls are still the main means of communication in people’s everyday life. However, calling services have remained unchanged for a long period of time and are lagging behind people’s communication expectations. In the journey towards 5.5G, how can we develop new services, provide users with richer voice and video calling experience, improve communication efficiency of enterprises, and create more business and social values? As MWC 2023 is just around the corner, let’s have a look at the New Calling solution developed by Huawei.
Upgrading Voice and Video Calling to Intelligent and Interactive Communication
Communication via calls is a fundamental and easy way to convey information, for not only individuals but also enterprises. If auxiliary functions can be added to calling, the communication efficiency will be greatly improved, especially for special user groups, such as the elderly and hearing-impaired people. Individual users hope to protect privacy, express themselves during video calls, and enjoy a fun interactive call process. Enterprise users expect to complete transactions with a mere phone call, and their customers do not need to download any apps or go through a complex process such as registration and authentication, improving the operation efficiency.
3GPP had completed standardization in March 2020 and introduced Data Channel (DC) technology on top of voice and video channels. In December 2021, 3GPP initiated the Next Generation Real Time Communication (NG-RTC) project in R18 and further clarified that the IMS DC adopts a separated control and media plane. This promotes the development of New Calling.
Huawei works with leading operators to implement joint innovation. They redefine traditional calling services with ultra-HD, intelligent, and interactive capabilities, and transform the dial pad from a simple communication tool to an entry that can create infinite values. Individuals can express their personalities; enterprises can improve the operation efficiency; operators can rapidly monetize the traffic of each call.
‘Friendly User’ Recruitment Is a Key Step for Commercial Use of New Calling
In January 2023, China Mobile and Huawei jointly started ‘friendly user’ recruitment in Zhejiang, Jiangsu, and Guangdong provinces for New Calling services such as real-time translation, fun calling, and visualized voice calling. This is a key step for commercial use of New Calling and will usher in a new era of communication for 1 billion mobile users.
Visualized voice calling: Individual users can define their personal avatars to convey emotions and display their personalities during voice calls, and enterprises can tailor their own promotion images.
Fun calling: Users can use functions such as background replacements, AR-based avatars, and voice/gesture-controlled emojis during video calls, making calls fun and interactive.
Real-time translation: This service can superimpose language translation and large font on mobile phone screens during calls, helping the elderly and hearing-impaired people break down communication barriers.
New Calling Unlocks a Huge Market for the Calling Industry
New Calling helps operators unlock a calling market worth hundreds of billions of dollars. By enhancing voice and video calling, operators shift to benefit from high-quality content instead of tradition one-dimensional phone calls. From enriching communication between individuals to empowering industries, New Calling expands service boundaries and allows calling services to continue the journey towards 5.5G.
MWC 2023 will be held from February 27 to March 2 in Barcelona, Spain. Huawei will release the New Calling solution and showcase New Calling services. To develop New Calling, we hope that more partners, including industry organizations, operators, equipment vendors, terminal and chip vendors, and content producers, can make collective efforts to build the New Calling ecosystem and promote the development and prosperity of the New Calling industry, achieving a win-win future.