UAE telco e& launches 5G slicing for enterprises, backed by Qualcomm deal to drive edge AI innovation, plus Ericsson’s dual-band radios to boost performance and capacity in mission-critical network services.
In sum – what you need to know:
Sliced For industry – e& UAE launches commercial 5G slicing, offering tailored connectivity and reserved capacity for critical enterprise apps in key sectors.
Edge AI push – new Qualcomm deal targets industrial gateways, XR hardware, and on-device AI to drive smarter, faster enterprise edge deployments.
Dual-band boost – Ericsson’s AIR 3229 radio goes live on e& UAE’s network, doubling TDD components and cutting carbon at high-capacity sites.
Emirati-based telco e& UAE has launched a commercial 5G network slicing product for business customers, leveraging its 5G standalone (SA) network. The firm said the new solution delivers tailored 5G connectivity to meet the evolving needs of industries and organizations across both public and private sectors. It is pitched, nominally, to enterprises in manufacturing, public safety, and port operations as a means to optimize network performance for mission-critical applications.
The idea – in case you’ve been trapped under a heavy object for the last five years – is that so-called network slices provide dedicated network resources to tailor peak performance for essential operations. In a press note, e& UAE talked about enterprises being able to “leverage end-to-end reserved capacity to ensure guaranteed performance”. It stated: “[It will] enable industry-specific use cases with the reliability and flexibility required for essential applications.”
The telco is claiming to offer “flexible options” around bandwidth-based 5G slicing packages. It is bundling dedicated airtime with industrial-grade 5G customer premises equipment (CPE), it said – to serve as an access point for “seamless integration and reliable performance” (and all the rest of it) for subscribed network slices.
Besides, e& UAE and Qualcomm have announced a partnership to develop next-generation 5G and edge AI technologies. They will collaborate variously on: 5G-based edge AI gateways for industrial and enterprise apps, to bring AI and such closer to the data source to improve performance; other edge AI devices, including PCs and extended reality (XR) hardware (based on Snapdragon platforms, featuring integrated large language models (LLMs) and on-device generative AI; and smart mobility and safety tech for road safety for UAE’s transport agencies.
In November last year (2024), e& UAE completed what it claimed was to be a world-first deployments of Ericsson’s dual-band Massive MIMO radio, the AIR 3229, on its network. The Swedish vendor said the deployment would boost network performance, increase capacity, and reduce carbon footprint. Its dual-band AIR 3229 radio supports simultaneous 5G service delivery on both the 2.6 GHz and 3.5 GHz bands – allowing for a doubling of time division duplex (TDD) carrier components (two to four) at high-capacity 5G sites.
The vendor also highlighted that this solution enhances network performance while addressing challenges related to site acquisition, installation complexity and tower load management. Ericsson’s solution reduces power consumption by 20% and minimizes the tower load by 25%.
Ericsson and e& UAE have previously signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) for the collaborative exploration of 6G technology, its use cases and future network evolution.
Ericsson noted that the 6G agreement with the Arab telco will serve as an early engagement for defining the next generation of future mobile network evolution. It will also include a series of technical discussions and engagements aimed at jointly exploring key 6G technology concepts, added the vendor.
e& UAE also previously said it had reached a new record speed of 62 Gbps after it aggregated multiple carriers across high-band and low-band over simplified architecture. The telco said it used “cutting-edge” hardware and “sophisticated” algorithms like MU-MIMO (multi-user, multiple input, multiple output) to achieve this 5G-A record speed.
