The roar of 80,000 fans at Shanghai Stadium on September 21, 2025, wasn’t just about the football match between Shanghai Shenhua and Chengdu Rongcheng – it was also a live demonstration of how telecom carriers are tackling one of their most pressing challenges: converting advanced network capabilities into revenue.
Huawei brought the international media to witness this implementation firsthand, offering many of us in the press corps our first experience of Chinese football culture. As supporters cheered in waves of blue and white, capturing moments on their phones and sharing videos (despite the crushing crowd density), China Mobile Shanghai’s newly deployed 5G-A network monetisation strategy was being tested in real-time, powered by Huawei’s GainLeap solution and intelligent wireless infrastructure.
From the media section, the scale of the technical challenge became apparent – ensuring 80,000 simultaneous users could stream, upload, and transact without network degradation. This was something that required more than additional bandwidth.
China Mobile Shanghai has become the first carrier in China to launch a differentiated 5G-A experience package, marking what industry observers see as a shift in how telecom operators might address revenue growth in saturated markets.
The “5G-A Exclusive Package for Shenhua Football Fans” is a way to transform the elastic capabilities of 5G-Advanced networks into tangible value that users can perceive and are willing to pay for.
The technical foundation for this 5G-A network monetisation strategy relies heavily on Huawei’s technology portfolio, from the GainLeap solution that identifies premium subscribers, to the AI-powered intelligent wireless boards that optimise network performance.
The business model innovation
The partnership between China Mobile Shanghai and Shanghai Shenhua Football Club offers approximately 200,000 football fans an annual package that combines network performance guarantees with fan-specific benefits.
Subscribers receive network acceleration on 5G-A, access to all matches via the Migu streaming service, unlimited video ringback tone downloads, and Shanghai Shenhua Football Club merchandise.
This approach to 5G-A network monetisation addresses what China Mobile Shanghai identifies as an important pain point for the telecommunications industry: how to drive quality growth when user acquisition has reached its ceiling. Rather than competing solely on price or basic connectivity, the package creates value through enhanced experiences in specific use-cases.
The technical infrastructure behind the experience
For Shanghai Stadium, China Mobile Shanghai implemented an elastic, scalable network capable of handling massive concurrent demand. During the match, with 80,000 users accessing the network simultaneously, 5G-A package subscribers can achieve download speeds of up to 600 Mbps.
The necessary technical foundation relies on Huawei’s GainLeap solution, which lets the network identify 5G-A subscribers and allocates them a high-speed 3CC (three-component carrier) channel. The differentiation is key to the 5G-A network monetisation model – creating measurable performance differences between standard and premium subscribers.
Behind the scenes, Huawei’s AI-powered intelligent wireless boards play a central role. They integrate on-board communications capabilities with artificial intelligence to perceive network service types, user experience goals, device characteristics, and resource status, in milliseconds.
According to test data provided by China Mobile Shanghai, they have helped result in QR code scanning latency reduced by 47%, WeChat uploading time shortened by 25%, live streaming speeds increased by 27%, and high-definition video ratios increased by 11%.
Infrastructure deployment scale
To support the high concurrent demand during events, China Mobile Shanghai and Huawei conducted comprehensive network upgrades at the stadium. The lower stands received 32 new 2.6 GHz and 4.9 GHz pRRUs (passive remote radio units), more than doubling overall network capacity. Seven escalator entrances each received a 4.9 GHz EM device to eliminate coverage dead spots.
On match days, more than 40 engineers are stationed onsite for real-time network monitoring and dynamic optimisation. Outside of the stadium, China Mobile Shanghai has achieved continuous 5G-A coverage in the area inside Shanghai’s Outer Ring Road, the five new towns further out, and 21 metro lines in the city.
The practical user experience
For fans at the match, the differentiated service manifested practically. The high bandwidth and business-level assurance capabilities enabled quick mobile payments for drinks, snacks, and souvenirs onsite. Users could share video highlights in real time without lag, even during peak moments when thousands of fans uploaded data simultaneously.
The ability to instantly see likes and comments from friends while still in the stadium represents the kind of enhanced experience that China Mobile Shanghai is betting users will value enough to pay a premium for. Whether this bet pays off commercially remains to be seen, but the technical execution at the September 21 match demonstrated that the infrastructure delivers on its promises.
Industry implications
The initiative raises questions about the future of 5G-A network monetisation strategies in the telecommunications industry. Traditional models have struggled to justify the massive infrastructure investments required for 5G and latterly, 5G-Advanced networks. By creating tiered experiences tied to specific user communities – in this case, football fans – carriers may have found a way to differentiate services beyond simple speed tiers.
The approach also represents a test case for how deeply integrated AI capabilities in network infrastructure can enable new business models. The intelligent wireless boards’ ability to make millisecond-level decisions about resource allocation is what makes the performance differentiation technically feasible at scale.
China Mobile Shanghai’s target of serving 200,000 Shenhua fans provides a measurable benchmark for assessing commercial viability.
As telecommunications companies globally grapple with how to monetise increasingly expensive network upgrades, China Mobile Shanghai’s experiment with community-specific, experience-based packages may offer insights for the industry’s evolution beyond traditional connectivity provision.
(Image source: Smart Shanghai )
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