Few things are more enjoyable than a river cruise – especially when it’s along China’s spectacular river Huangpu in Shanghai. With the city’s dazzling evening lightshow reflecting off the water, the historic Bund illuminated in all its glory, and the imposing silhouette of China’s tallest building – the Shanghai Tower – rising above the skyline, my evening cruise was everything I had hoped it would be. It’s almost impossible not to be captivated by Shanghai’s unique blend of old-world charm and futuristic ambition, and every year, thousands of tourists feel the same way.
Shanghai has long prioritised the growth of its tourism sector, and its Three-Year Plan for High-Quality Tourism (2025-2027)[i] places technology at the forefront of improving services to ensure comfortable, convenient travel for visitors. The city already offers a dynamic blend of historical, cultural, and natural attractions interwoven with striking modern architecture, and in recent years, Shanghai’s cruise economy has also flourished, attracting a diverse clientele. However, traditional cruise service models are increasingly struggling to deliver the personalised and intelligent experiences that today’s travellers expect.
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Why doesn’t Wi-Fi work well on a boat?
For today’s Instagram and Tik-Tok savvy tourists, the Huangpu River cruise service is currently hindered by two main challenges: unreliable onboard internet connectivity, which detracts from the tourist experience, and inadequate translation services, making it difficult to cater to international visitors. To overcome both these barriers, and enhance revenue and competitiveness, the introduction of AI glasses provides a promising solution, presenting a multi-lingual AI-driven tour guide to enrich the overall visitor experience.
However, delivering effective AI-powered tour guidance requires a stable uplink speed of 20 Mbps throughout the cruise. Achieving this is complicated by the river’s challenging signal environment, where reflections and the substantial signal loss caused by the cruise ship’s thick metal structure pose significant obstacles. Traditional network solutions are insufficient for two reasons: sub-3G bandwidth cannot meet the demands of hundreds of passengers at once, and high-frequency signals are particularly susceptible to penetration loss and signal blockages, especially during sharp manoeuvres such as turning, which often leads to coverage dropouts and diminished service quality.
Introducing the 5G-A & AI Network
To address these challenges, China Telecom Shanghai is rolling out a network project for Jiushi Tourism Group in Shanghai, built on Huawei’s 5G-A (Advanced) & AI technology. It spans land, river, and low-altitude airspace to ensure an exceptional user experience, wherever the tourist is vacationing. On land, a 3CC 5G-A network utilising 2.1 GHz and 3.5 GHz bands delivers both uplink and downlink speeds in the gigabit range, with individual users achieving peaks of 4 Gbps downlink and 1 Gbps uplink.
For riverside and onboard environments, the company has pioneered a solution combining mmWave base stations along the Huangpu River with a 5G-A C-band 3CC distributed network inside cruise ships. LampSite X devices are installed within cabins, while mmWave CPEs positioned at each corner of the ship provide robust backhaul, ensuring comprehensive C-band 3CC coverage throughout the vessel.
This innovative design tackles the unique challenges of cruise connectivity by avoiding co-channel interference with onshore sites, employing 800 MHz of ultra-wide mmWave bandwidth to support hundreds of passengers, and placing LampSite X units inside cabins to counteract signal loss from thick metal walls, adding a further 300 MHz of bandwidth for increased capacity. The strategic placement of mmWave CPEs at the ship’s corners maintains line-of-sight connections regardless of the ship’s orientation, with signal aggregation ensuring uninterrupted transmission. Field tests have demonstrated impressive results, with downlink speeds in cabins reaching 3.1 Gbps and uplink speeds peaking at 260 Mbps on 5G-A devices.
For low-altitude air space, China Telecom Shanghai applies mmWave at the Longhua Airport low-altitude test base to support a range of airspace applications, including identification of drones and robust low-altitude communications, as well as providing reliable connectivity for activities such as medical rescue, food delivery, security operations, and logistics.
Live tourism guide and translation services via AI glasses
In a bid to provide tourists with fully immersive multilingual guides and real-time translation, China Telecom Shanghai has introduced AI-glasses rentals on Huangpu River cruise ships, bringing a new wave of technological innovation to river tourism.
During my cruise on the “Junzilan” (Silverfish) cruise ship – part of Huangpu River Cruise – I had an opportunity to try these out and was extremely impressed. The AI glasses were similar to sunglasses in size, shape and weight, and when looking up at the Shanghai Tower, for instance, the AI recognised what I was looking at and proceeded to provide me with cultural information. The glasses projected facts about the building as an ‘overlay’ on the image in English, including the impressive stats of the tower being 632m high with 128 storeys.
During peak holiday periods, Shanghai’s cruises can carry over 30,000 passengers in a single day (more than 4 million a year). This substantial footfall highlights the significant market potential of international tourism for Shanghai, with the prospect of generating annual revenues in the tens of millions of yuan for cruise operators.
Following the success of AI-glasses rentals on cruise ships, China Telecom Shanghai now plans to repurpose phone booths across the city to offer citywide AI-glasses rentals. This initiative aims to bring a fresh, technology-driven boost to Shanghai’s urban tourism, making immersive, multilingual experiences accessible to visitors throughout the city.
At the recent MWC Shanghai 2025, the Huangpu River Cruise showcase became a major talking point of the event, attracting widespread attention from both industry experts and attendees. It highlighted how advanced 5G-A & AI technologies could be seamlessly integrated into the tourism sector, offering passengers high-speed connectivity and immersive, multilingual experiences.
Inspired by this achievement, several leading carriers quickly announced plans to implement their own riverside and offshore network coverage solutions, aiming to replicate and build upon the success seen in Shanghai. This wave of innovation is expected to further elevate the standard of connectivity and digital services available to tourists and residents alike, marking a significant step forward for smart tourism and network infrastructure development.
[i] https://english.shanghai.gov.cn/en-Latest-WhatsNew/20250225/b149c95613f348f191d9dac366de8d18.html
