ZTE 5G Summit & User Congress November 5-6, 2024 Istanbul, Türkiye

The purpose of this report is to summarize the event, its presentations, and personal conversations at the ZTE 5G Summit & Analyst Conference held November 5th and 6th, 2024 in Istanbul, Türkiye. 

SUMMARY

We attended the ZTE 5G Summit & Analyst Conference event which was held at the Çirağan Palace Kempinski Hotel in Istanbul, Türkiye on November 5-6, 2024. We note that Huawei Technologies held its Global MBB Forum 2024 event at a different location in Istanbul the week before on October 30-31, 2024. We estimate that several hundred guests including media, analysts, local dignitaries, and customers along with a large crew of ZTE employees were in attendance.

This was the 11th time for this annual 5G event held by ZTE Corporation. This year’s theme was “Flourish Through Intelligent Innovation.” This could be a reminder that there are there non-intelligent innovation strategies for communication service providers (CSP) that could create the opposite effect. The event began with repeated playing of NENA’s “99 Luftballons” song from 1983 where the meaning of the song was about the potential for nuclear war. We are unsure as to the intention for playing this song at the beginning of the event.

Day 1 and Day 2 Highlights

• Day 1 was packed with 23 presentations and started with a keynote from ZTE CEO Mr. Xu Ziyang titled “Digital Bridge of Civilization, Link Across Carbon and Silicon” that focused on four links: Data, Wisdom, Symbiotic, Civilization
• The second day of the event was devoted to Analysts only and consisted of five key presentations spanning 5G/5G-A RAN, 5G-A Core, 5G Monetization, 5G-Advanced to 6G, L4+ Autonomous Networks, 5G/5G-A Network Modernization. The theme was “To Enable Connectivity and Trust Everywhere.” The need for “zero trust” security and an architecture that enables this is critical for all CSPs.