Chinese telco China Unicom deployed its 5G Standalone (5G SA) network for this year's Humanoid Robot Games.

The event, held this past weekend at the Beijing National Speed Skating Oval, was covered both indoors and outdoors with China Unicom's 5G SA network.

The event aims to promote advances in AI and robotics, with 280 teams from 16 countries competing. More than 500 robots took part.

The machines competed in sports events such as track and field and table tennis, while also being challenged to complete robot-specific tasks such as sorting medicines, handling materials, and providing cleaning services.

During a football match, some of the humanoids crashed into each other and toppled over, while during running events, some robots collapsed mid-sprint.

In one video shared on YouTube, a robot fell backwards while trying to land a kickboxing shot on its opponent.

China Unicom provided its 5G SA network to support the AI demands needed, noted the company.

5G SA is not reliant on older mobile generations and solely uses a 5G core network, which make it better equipped to embrace AI. The earlier 5G networks were 5G Non-Standalone (NSA), and relied on the 4G core instead.

"Our 5G-A networks currently serve users, and we're upgrading them to support embodied AI as well," said Qin Yang, deputy general manager of China Unicom Beijing.

"Our 5G-A network for this event reflects this progress. It dedicates a channel for spectators and a dynamically scalable one for robots, realizing seamless connectivity for both spectators and robots even during peak usage. In the robot sector, 5G-A will also be key to enabling low-latency remote control."

Inside the venue, China Unicom deployed its 5G-A digital indoor system, which utilizes 300MHz ultra-high-bandwidth spectrum. According to the telco, it's able to deliver uplink speeds above 100 Mbps, meaning that multiple 4K machine vision streams can be uploaded without frame loss.

China Unicom also noted that this ensures interface latency remains below 20 ms, so robots can respond to commands instantly.

Meanwhile, the carrier's 5G-A 3D network outdoors, which coordinates 1:1 high and low bands, was able to achieve downlink and uplink speeds of 10 Gbps and 4 Gbps, respectively.

"With this fast connectivity, 8K panoramic cameras merge footage live, media like CCTV upload UHD shallow-compressed signals in seconds, and crowds live stream and share videos without lag," said the company.