At LEAP 2026 in Riyadh, Huawei Saudi Arabia’s Chief Advisor for Mobile Broadband explains why the network is no longer just a pipe, what a “more capable network” means for ordinary users, where 5G Advanced in Saudi Arabia stands today, and how operators in the Kingdom are approaching autonomous networks.
Produced in partnership with Huawei
Few people have watched Saudi Arabia’s mobile networks evolve as closely as Emmanuel Coelho Alves. Chief Advisor for Mobile Broadband at Huawei Saudi Arabia, he has known the Saudi market for many years and, since the end of last year, has been fully dedicated to it. We met him on the sidelines of LEAP 2026 to talk about 5G Advanced in Saudi Arabia and the changes the AI era is bringing to the networks that carry it.
The network is no longer just a pipe. What does the AI era ask of operators in Saudi Arabia over the next two to three years?
For Coelho Alves, the shift is not a forecast but a description of current work. “It’s already happening today,” he says. “There is already work ongoing to adapt the network business to all the changes coming from AI.”
The first change is driven by the services people are already using. “What we see today from operators is to look at all the new services entering the market, that people are already using. And those AI-based services need capabilities that the network has to deliver. This is what we work on day by day with operators: getting things ready for all those new applications at the network level.”
The second change is to the network itself. AI, he explains, “has the capability to improve the way you deal with the network, the way you operate the network.” That means looking at how operators manage, operate and optimise their networks today and asking where AI can help, so that the network becomes “even more capable, even more flexible, even more optimised, day by day, for every type of service.”
“Saudi, you can say, is one of the countries in the world that cares most and has the most advanced innovation on this topic.”
What does a “more capable network” actually mean for the average user?
Performance still matters, but Coelho Alves is clear about what matters most. “For the end users, those who are really using the network, the most important thing is experience,” he says. “Today you have an ocean of services. What you need is to guarantee a good experience: whoever you are, whatever type of service, wherever you are, depending on the place, the time of day, including when you are indoors.”
Meeting that expectation across so many scenarios requires multiple capabilities working together, and in his view the experience of the end user “is sometimes more than just pure performance.”
5G Advanced in Saudi Arabia and the GCC: where does the rollout stand today?
“It’s true that today we are just in the migration from 5G to 5G Advanced,” he says. “5G Advanced is, as of today, the latest technology we have in wireless, and Saudi Arabia, like other GCC countries, is already starting to make use of it.”
The new generation brings capabilities that map directly onto the experience question: service-level experience, and the experience on new types of services such as mobile AI. “There are capabilities that 5G Advanced delivers quite nicely, for example on uplink, and on the latency of the network. All of these are advantages we get from 5G Advanced, and it’s true that currently the GCC, including Saudi, is quite advanced in already putting this into commercial use.” His conclusion for anyone following 5G Advanced in Saudi Arabia is simple: “You can already benefit from it today if you live in Saudi.”
From single-domain to multi-domain autonomy: what is realistic for operators in the next couple of years, and where are the hardest obstacles?
“It’s a massive topic today,” Coelho Alves says. “Automation is the big debate in the industry: how to make the best possible use of automation.” The long-term target may be full automation of every network task, but the milestone the industry is working towards now, “including here in Saudi Arabia,” is what TM Forum defines as Level 4 automation.
Level 4, he explains, rests on two bases. The first is closed loop: everything the network produces, “all statistics, all measurements, all performance,” becomes data that gives full visibility of the network, and that visibility is used “to change, to optimise, to make the right decision at the network level.” The second is self-decision. “It’s not just a closed loop where you pull information and at the end there is an action on the network. The network itself is capable of self-decision. It can be about alarms, it can be about different aspects.”
Getting there is a roadmap rather than a switch. “If you look at a network like here in Saudi Arabia, you have hundreds of tasks for whatever you can imagine at the network level. It’s obvious you will not move all the tasks to Level 4 at once.” Huawei is therefore working with operators to select the use cases that make the most sense: “which ones give them more value and benefit, and which ones are complex enough that automation can bring some advantage.” The change starts where the benefit is clearest.
How close are operators today? “You can say some of the tasks are already at Level 4, but we are still in the early, early stage of this journey. This is where the industry is moving, and this is definitely where we see benefit, because the network is getting more complex.”
“In the early days, when I started working in wireless, there was basically voice and SMS. Full stop. Today we are handling a huge amount of services: from basic services, to mobile payment, to new applications like ChatGPT. With all this complexity, automation will definitely bring benefit.”
This interview was recorded at LEAP 2026, Riyadh, and produced by Saudi ICT Shopper News in partnership with Huawei. Quotes have been lightly edited for clarity.
