Huawei UBBS Kicks Off in Moscow for Russia and CIS Leg of World Tour

Today, Huawei Ultra-broadband Summit 2016 made its stop in Moscow for the Russia and Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) leg of its world tour. With the theme of "embracing the big video era", the summit brought together 200 mid- and high-level executives from telecom operators, policy makers and regulators, consultants, and video partners. At the summit, Huawei jointly released a white paper on "Building a Better Connected Russia" with Ovum, a world-leading IT and telecommunications analyst firm. The white paper illustrates how to drive the development of Russia's digital economy through creating ultra-broadband infrastructure. Huawei also demonstrated cutting-edge ultra-broadband technologies and solutions on Gigaband access, Smart Home, best-experience bearer networks, and ICT transformation. Aiden Wu, CEO of Huawei Russia, stated in his opening speech: "ICT has become an important factor for GDP growth in Russia and other countries, and ultra-broadband is the cornerstone of ICT development. In the lead up to World Cup 2018 in Russia, 4K video, Smart Home, VR, AR, cloud services, and other emerging services will become more popular in Russia. Ultra-broadband is the basis of these services. We will collaborate with all links in the industry chain in Russia to enable ultra-broadband development to keep pace with new services, contributing to Russia's increasing informatization and economic development." Alla Shabelnikova, Ovum's senior analyst for Europe and CIS, gave a keynote speech on investing in ultra-broadband to support the growing demand in heavy content. She emphasized the role of user experience: "As 4K content and terminals are becoming popular, video traffic will grow explosively. User experience will become a key factor for video services, which requires network upgrades to meet user demands for bandwidth and experience." Major operators in Russia, such as Rostelecom, VimpelCom, and MTS, as well as the OTT provider IVI and third-party consultancy Minnova, explored video and experience demands of users and predicted video service development trends in Russia. MGTS, Beltelecom, and PCCW also shared their success stories for network development. The UBBS world tour 2016 is organized by Huawei, together with United Nations Broadband Committee and well-known regional telecom consultancies. The tour started in Hong Kong and continues through Dubai, Singapore, Moscow, South Africa, Beijing, and Argentina. The summit is a platform for in-depth, comprehensive, and multi-stage dialogue, aiming to encourage regional operator executives and broadband industry partners to exchange innovative ideas, share success stories, and discuss models for sustainable industry development, in a bid to maximize the potential of ultra-broadband.