At Huawei Connect in Florence, Dennis Tossijn, ICT Network CTO at Huawei Benelux and Ireland, explained how artificial intelligence, fiber infrastructure, unified IoT integration, and quantum-ready encryption are reshaping what enterprise networks can deliver. This can be across various sectors; retail, healthcare, hospitality, and beyond.
When enterprise customers talk to Huawei about their networks today, the conversation quickly moves beyond basic connectivity. According to Tossijn, customers increasingly want a single infrastructure that integrates IoT devices, sensing environments, and business applications. All in a secure and manageable way.
Retail is a strong example, as it has many IoT devices today. A modern retail environment runs electronic shelf labels (ESLs), handheld scanners, point-of-sale (POS) systems, cameras, and building automation, often on separate networks. Huawei’s proposition is to consolidate these onto one infrastructure, reducing operational cost and energy use while enabling new use cases.
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Campus AI: managing networks more intelligently
Huawei’s Campus AI platform uses AI to automate network management, simplify troubleshooting, and optimize wireless environments. Rather than relying on static configurations, the platform continuously analyzes data from every connected device, user, and application running on the network.
The platform is delivered in three ways: as a SaaS solution running on Open Telekom Cloud in Germany, as an on-premise deployment, or as an MSP-owned solution hosted in a partner data center. This flexibility allows organizations to choose the deployment model that fits their data sovereignty and operational requirements.
Functionality includes device management, wireless controller capabilities, SDN-style automation, and a real-time analyzer. That analyzer gives network teams both a high-level overview and the ability to drill down to individual bits and bytes. The platform can identify the root cause of a network issue in 90% of cases before a technician even begins troubleshooting.
AI-driven security: blocking threats in seconds
Security is built into the platform’s real-time analytics engine. If a malicious device connects to the network, Huawei’s AI can detect and block it within a few seconds, drawing on a continuously updated database of known malicious devices and applications.
The same intelligence works in the other direction: business-critical applications can be identified and given reserved bandwidth and prioritized treatment across both wired and wireless infrastructure. This end-to-end quality of service ensures that critical applications remain performant even when the network is under stress; it uses AI to optimize the network and prioritize the critical applications.
Fiber vs copper
One of the more interesting topics at Huawei Connect was the case for replacing copper cabling with fiber. Even in enterprise environments where Power over Ethernet (PoE) is widely used. Tossijn made both an environmental and a financial argument for the transition.
Copper mining has a significant environmental footprint, and copper cabling introduces signal loss over long distances. Fiber, by contrast, can carry signals across much longer distances with far less loss. For large environments like distribution centers with halls hundreds of meters long, copper would require a new switch every 90 meters to re-amplify the signal. Fiber eliminates most of those intermediate switches, reducing both capital expenditure and ongoing energy consumption.
To address the power delivery challenge, since fiber cannot carry electrical current, Huawei offers a hybrid cable that combines fiber for data with a copper element solely for powering remote units. This allows centralized management of remote devices from a locked, secure location, while still covering the long distances that fiber enables.
In greenfield deployments, Tossijn argues the total cost of ownership calculation strongly favors fiber: the savings from eliminating switches outweigh the slightly higher cost of fiber cabling. In retrofit environments, the calculus depends on how much of the existing infrastructure can be reused.
Wi-Fi plus IoT: one infrastructure for everything
Huawei’s access points are designed to do more than provide Wi-Fi connectivity. Each unit features integrated IoT slots, it uses an industry-standard connector inside the access point body that provides both power and network connectivity to pluggable modules. Partners and end customers can develop their own modules for these slots, enabling the access point to simultaneously run Wi-Fi, Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), Zigbee for smart locks, and other wireless protocols, all from a single cable run.
The access points also support running containerized applications, allowing small edge computing workloads to run directly on the device. For security, Huawei offers zero-roaming access points that physically separate intranet, extranet, and IoT traffic at the hardware level within a single unit.
In retail, this means a single access point can handle Wi-Fi for staff devices, ESL communication, and even occupancy sensing. This eliminates the need for separate parallel infrastructures, each requiring independent management and maintenance.
Wi-Fi sensing: presence, motion, and beyond
Perhaps the most forward-looking capability Tossijn discussed is Wi-Fi sensing. Huawei uses the existing Wi-Fi 7 signal, analyzed through channel state information (CSI), to detect human presence and movement without any dedicated sensors or cameras.
In a hotel room scenario, an access point mounted in the hallway can detect when a guest enters their room, triggering the lights, air conditioning, and smart screen to activate. When the guest leaves the room for more than, let’s say, 10 minutes, the room systems switch off automatically, saving energy without requiring any additional hardware beyond the Wi-Fi infrastructure already in place.
The technology can distinguish which room a person is in, even through walls, without identifying who that person is. A companion app allows administrators to define smart spaces and configure the detection thresholds for each zone.
Gesture control is in active development and expected to be available within a year. This will allow users to open curtains, adjust temperature, or control room systems with physical gestures, all interpreted via the Wi-Fi signal. Even further along the research roadmap is micro-movement detection: Huawei’s engineers are working on detecting the chest movement caused by breathing, entirely from a Wi-Fi signal. This sounds really interesthing and could be a huge capability with significant potential in healthcare monitoring, but first we need to see how good that will work.
Quantum-ready encryption: preparing for the post-quantum era
Tossijn also addressed the emerging threat of quantum computing to current encryption standards. While quantum computers cannot yet decrypt modern encryption, adversaries are already harvesting encrypted data today in anticipation of future quantum decryption capability.
Huawei has responded by embedding quantum-ready encryption components into both the software and hardware of its router platforms. Financial institutions and government organizations are the primary audiences for this capability today, but Tossijn emphasized that preparation needs to start now, before quantum decryption becomes a practical threat.
The ecosystem challenge: integration remains the hard part
When asked what remains genuinely difficult to solve in enterprise networking, Tossijn pointed not to technology but to ecosystem integration. Making a hotel room smart requires not just Wi-Fi infrastructure, but deep integration with building management systems, room control platforms, and all kinds of partner solutions. Each solution developed by different vendors with different APIs and standards.
Huawei Connect Florence itself reflected this reality: alongside Huawei’s own products, the event prominently featured technology partners and ecosystem integrators whose solutions complete the picture. Tossijn confirmed that Huawei’s Wi-Fi infrastructure is compatible with third-party switching vendors, including Cisco and HP. This means organizations do not need to replace their entire infrastructure to benefit from Huawei’s access point and sensing capabilities.
It’s good to see what Huawei is doing on the network front and what’s coming up next. It will be interesting to see how far they can take these features.