At the Decoding China 2026 event, held at Huawei's research center in Lianqiu Hu, Shanghai, on October 27, Huawei introduced a new generation of products for mobile networks. The centerpiece of the presentation was the Huawei VitaAAU—a base station block antenna unit designed for the upper half of the 6 GHz band, known as U6GHz.
The VitaAAU is an active antenna unit that integrates radio modules and antenna arrays. Huawei positions this product as the successor to the MetaAAU, which was used for sub-bands below 6 GHz. This is the first product to implement Huawei's RetinaMIMO technology in the U6GHz band. RetinaMIMO is based on three key parameters: 256 transmit and receive channels, over 1500 antenna elements, and high-speed beam scanning, which Huawei calls HBF.
The main goal of this technology is to ensure more precise control over beams and spectrum, allowing the network to handle a larger volume of traffic and provide more uniform user service. Furthermore, Huawei notes that this unit features a simplified and more eco-friendly hardware architecture.
The U6GHz band is important because it provides wide contiguous blocks of spectrum that operators can use to achieve very high throughput. Huawei reports that the VitaAAU supports peak user speeds of up to 10 Gbps and has already begun commercial operation, having been deployed in the United Arab Emirates, Hong Kong, and Macau.
Focus on the uplink channel
Fang Xiang, Vice President of Huawei and Director of the Wireless Network Management Committee, emphasized that artificial intelligence is transforming the nature of mobile traffic. As AI moves from the digital world into physical devices, and services become accessible to all types of terminals, networks originally designed primarily for downloads must now handle uploads on a similar scale. He suggested that the value of a network should be measured not only by the number of connections, according to Metcalfe's law, but also by the average quality of those connections.
Huawei also stated that it applies the principles of Tao's Law when designing base stations. This approach is used at the system level: the network is viewed as a single cell, which allows planning tasks to be solved compactly at the entire system level, reducing the time required for radio decision calculations and increasing overall performance.
The event will run until October 29, during which Huawei's division demonstrated a wide range of products in addition to the VitaAAU.