The roaring of 80,000 fans at Shanghai Stadium on September 21, 2025 was not just a soccer match between Shanghai Shenhua and Chengdu Longken. It was also a live demonstration where communications personnel were tackling one of the most pressing challenges.
Huawei brought international media, witnessed this implementation firsthand, and provided many of us at Press Corps with the first experience of Chinese football culture. Supporters cheered in blue and white waves, captured moments on their phones, shared videos (destroying crowd density), and China’s mobile Shanghai’s newly deployed 5G-A network monetization strategy was being tested in real time with Huawei’s GainLeap Solution and Intelligent Wireless Infrastructure.
The media section reveals the scale of the technical challenges. Allows 80,000 simultaneous users to stream, upload and trade without network degradation. This required more than extra bandwidth.
China’s Mobile Shanghai became China’s first airline to launch a differentiated 5G-A experience package, marking what industry observers see as a change in how telcos deal with revenue growth in saturated markets.
“5G-A Exclusive Package for Shenhua Football fans” is a way to translate the resilience capabilities of 5G Advanced networks into tangible value that users can recognize and pay.
The technology foundation of this 5G-A network monetization strategy relies heavily on Huawei’s technology portfolio, ranging from GainLeap solutions that identify premium subscribers to AI-powered intelligent wireless boards that optimize network performance.
Business model innovation
China Mobile Shanghai and Shanghai Shenhu Football Club partnership will offer approximately 200,000 soccer fans an annual package that combines network performance guarantees with fan-specific benefits.
Subscribers will receive 5G-A network acceleration, access to all matches via MIGU streaming services, unlimited video ring back tone downloads, and Shanghai Shenhu Football Club merchandise.
This approach to monetizing 5G-A networks deals with what China’s Mobile Shanghai identifies as an important issue for the telecommunications industry. This is a way to promote quality growth when user acquisition reaches the ceiling. Rather than competing on price or basic connections alone, packages create value through enhanced experiences in specific use cases.
The technology infrastructure behind the experience
For Shanghai Stadium, China’s Mobile Shanghai has implemented a resilient, scalable network that can handle large-scale simultaneous demand. During a match, 80,000 users access the network simultaneously, allowing 5G-A package subscribers to achieve download speeds of up to 600 Mbps.
The required technical foundation depends on Huawei’s GainLeap solution. This allows the network to identify 5G-A subscribers and assign high-speed 3cc (three-component carrier) channels. Distinguishing is key to the 5G-A network monetization model, creating measurable performance differences between standard and premium subscribers.
Behind the scenes, Huawei’s AI-powered intelligent wireless board plays a central role. Integrates onboard communications with artificial intelligence to perceive network service types, user experience goals, device characteristics, and resource status in milliseconds.
Test data provided by China Mobile Shanghai showed that QR code scan latency reduced by 47%, WeChat upload times reduced by 25%, live streaming speed increased by 27%, and high resolution video ratio increased by 11%.
Scaling infrastructure deployment
To support the high simultaneous demand during the event, China’s Mobile Shanghai and Huawei have implemented comprehensive network upgrades at their stadiums. The lower stand has received 32 new 2.6 GHz and 4.9 GHz PRRUS (passive remote radio units), more than doubled the overall network capacity. The seven escalator entrances each received a 4.9 GHz EM device, eliminating coverage dead spots.
On match day, over 40 engineers are placed onsite for real-time network monitoring and dynamic optimization. Outside the stadium, China’s Mobile Shanghai achieved continuous 5G-A coverage in areas within the ring road outside Shanghai.
A practical user experience
For the fans of the match, differentiated service has essentially emerged. High bandwidth and business-level guarantees enable rapid mobile payments for on-site drinks, snacks and souvenirs. Users can share video highlights in real time without lag, even at peak moments when thousands of fans upload data at the same time.
The ability to instantly see likes and comments from friends while still in the stadium represents an enhanced experience like China’s Mobile Shanghai bets enough value for users to pay a premium. Whether this will pay off commercially remains to be seen, but technical executions at the September 21 match showed infrastructure would provide that promise.
Impact on the industry
This initiative raises questions about the future of 5G-A network monetization strategies in the telecommunications industry. Traditional models struggle to justify the large infrastructure investment needed for 5G and later 5G advanced networks. By creating a tiered experience related to a particular user community (in this case, soccer fans), carriers may have found ways to distinguish services beyond the simple speed layer.
This approach represents a test case of how deeply integrated AI capabilities are in the network infrastructure. The ability of intelligent wireless boards to make millisecond-level decisions regarding resource allocation makes performance differentiation possible at technical scale.
China’s Mobile Shanghai goal, serving 200,000 Shenhua fans, offers a measurable benchmark to assess commercial viability.
As telecommunications companies are working globally on ways to monetize increasingly expensive network upgrades, experiments on community-specific experience-based packaging in China’s Mobile Shanghai mobile may provide insight into the evolution of the industry beyond traditional connectivity offerings.
(Image source: Smart Shanghai)
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