Huawei Powers First Monetized Fan Network

The electrifying atmosphere at Shanghai Stadium, where 80,000 fervent fans roared on September 21, 2025, wasn’t just celebrating the clash between Shanghai Shenhua and Chengdu Rongcheng. It also illuminated a crucial inflection point for telecom carriers: effectively translating cutting-edge network capabilities into tangible revenue streams.

The high-profile match served as a live proving ground for China Mobile Shanghai’s novel 5G-Advanced (5G-A) network monetization strategy, a strategy powered by Huawei’s GainLeap solution and an AI-driven intelligent wireless infrastructure. This initiative marks a significant departure from traditional telecom business models and offers a glimpse into the future of network monetization.

The sheer scale of the challenge was immediately apparent. Ensuring seamless connectivity for 80,000 users simultaneously streaming, uploading, and engaging in transactions demanded capabilities far beyond simple bandwidth augmentation. This required a sophisticated, dynamic allocation of network resources tailored to specific user needs.

China Mobile Shanghai’s launch of a differentiated 5G-A experience package represents a pivotal moment. Industry analysts view this as a potential blueprint for telecom operators seeking revenue growth in increasingly saturated markets, focusing on delivering premium, experience-driven services.

The “5G-A Exclusive Package for Shenhua Football Fans” aims to transform the inherent flexibility of 5G-Advanced networks into a value proposition that resonates with consumers and justifies a premium price point. The underlying technical foundation is built upon Huawei’s technology, encompassing the GainLeap solution (for identifying and prioritizing premium subscribers) and AI-infused wireless boards (for optimizing network performance in real-time).

Business Model Innovation: Beyond Connectivity

The partnership between China Mobile Shanghai and Shanghai Shenhua strategically targets a dedicated community of approximately 200,000 football enthusiasts. The annual package integrates guaranteed network performance enhancements with fan-centric perks.

Subscribers benefit from accelerated 5G-A network speeds, unrestricted access to all matches via the Migu streaming platform, unlimited video ringback tone downloads showcasing team highlights, and exclusive Shanghai Shenhua Football Club merchandise. This multifaceted approach directly addresses a key pain point: how to achieve sustained quality growth when user acquisition has plateaued.

This strategy eschews traditional price competition and basic connectivity offerings. Instead, it generates value by delivering superior experiences tailored to specific use cases – in this instance, enhancing the football viewing experience. The underlying philosophy is to create distinct, perceptible advantages for premium subscribers, justifying the incremental cost.

Technical Infrastructure: AI-Powered Optimization

To address the unique demands of Shanghai Stadium, China Mobile Shanghai deployed a highly elastic and scalable network architecture designed to accommodate massive concurrent user loads. During the match, 5G-A package subscribers demonstrably achieved download speeds reaching up to 600 Mbps, even amidst peak network congestion.

The core technical enabler is Huawei’s GainLeap solution. GainLeap dynamically identifies 5G-A subscribers and seamlessly allocates them a dedicated high-speed 3CC (three-component carrier) channel. This performance differentiation is paramount to the 5G-A network monetization model. The network must exhibit tangible and measurable performance improvements to incentivize premium subscriptions.

Crucially, Huawei’s AI-powered intelligent wireless boards are integral to the solution. These advanced boards seamlessly integrate communication capabilities with artificial intelligence, enabling them to evaluate network service types, user experience goals, device attributes, and resource availability within milliseconds. This rapid analysis and intelligent resource allocation are essential for delivering differentiated service levels.

According to performance data released by China Mobile Shanghai, the deployment of these AI-driven boards has resulted in impressive gains. QR code scanning latency decreased by 47%, WeChat upload times were reduced by 25%, live streaming speeds increased by 27%, and high-definition video ratios improved by 11%. These metrics represent tangible improvements in user experience resulting directly from the network upgrades.

Network Deployment: Scalability and Coverage

To manage the extreme concurrent demand during events, China Mobile Shanghai, in collaboration with Huawei, undertook comprehensive network upgrades at the stadium. The lower stands saw the installation of 32 new 2.6 GHz and 4.9 GHz pRRUs (passive remote radio units), effectively more than doubling the overall network capacity. Furthermore, seven escalator entrances were outfitted with dedicated 4.9 GHz EM devices to eliminate potential coverage dead spots.

On match days, a dedicated team of over 40 engineers are strategically stationed onsite to provide real-time network monitoring and dynamic optimization. Beyond the stadium, China Mobile Shanghai has also achieved extensive 5G-A coverage throughout Shanghai’s Outer Ring Road, the city’s five new towns, and across its 21 metro lines.

Practical User Benefits

Match attendees experienced the enhanced service levels firsthand. The combination of high bandwidth and guaranteed quality of service facilitated rapid and reliable mobile payments for food, beverages, and merchandise throughout the stadium. Moreover, fans could seamlessly share real-time video highlights without experiencing lag, even during peak moments when thousands of users were simultaneously uploading data.

The ability to immediately see “likes” and comments from friends while still present at the stadium is precisely the kind of enriched experience that China Mobile Shanghai is betting consumers will value sufficiently to justify a premium subscription. The commercial success of this initiative remains to be determined, but the technical execution during the September 21 match clearly demonstrated that the underlying infrastructure delivers on its performance promises.

Industry-Wide Implications: A New Monetization Model?

This initiative raises fundamental questions about the future of 5G-A network monetization within the broader telecommunications landscape. Traditional models have often struggled to recoup the massive capital investments required for 5G and, increasingly, 5G-Advanced network deployments. By creating tiered experiences targeted at specific user communities – in this case, dedicated football fans – carriers may have uncovered a viable strategy for differentiating services beyond simple speed tiers and commodity bandwidth.

The project also serves as a compelling test case for the potential of deeply integrated AI capabilities within network infrastructure to enable entirely new business models. The intelligent wireless boards’ ability to make millisecond-level decisions regarding resource allocation is a cornerstone of the entire performance differentiation strategy. Without this level of granular control and dynamic optimization, achieving meaningful and consistent performance gains for premium subscribers at scale would be technically unrealistic.

China Mobile Shanghai’s goal of acquiring 200,000 Shenhua fans as subscribers provides a tangible and measurable benchmark for assessing the commercial viability of this innovative approach.

As telecommunications companies worldwide wrestle with the challenge of monetizing increasingly costly network upgrades, China Mobile Shanghai’s foray into community-specific, experience-based packages may offer critical insights for defining the industry’s evolution beyond traditional connectivity provision. The success or failure of this strategy could provide a roadmap for other carriers seeking sustainable revenue growth in the 5G-Advanced era.