Building the World's First Wi-Fi 7 Airport and Setting a Global Benchmark for Airport Networking

Positioned on the southern shore of the Strait of Hormuz, Oman stands as a vital crossroads linking Asia, Africa, and Europe. Throughout this historic and wonderful land, Oman Airports serves as the nation's gateway, operating four civilian airports: Muscat International Airport, Salalah Airport, Duqm Airport, and Sohar Airport.

At the heart of this network is Muscat International Airport, the hub for Oman Air and a global name in aviation. Handling more than 95,000 flights each year and welcoming over 12.6 million passengers annually, Muscat International Airport has earned worldwide recognition, having been ranked 5th by AirHelp among the world's best airports 2025.

With the rapid rise of the digital economy, travelers' expectations of airports have long gone beyond simple transit. They now demand seamless connectivity and real-time information throughout their journeys. In response, Oman Airports has launched a comprehensive digital transformation, upgrading networks across its four civilian airports. The goal is to create a smarter, more convenient travel ecosystem. This is not just a hardware upgrade; it represents a profound shift in service philosophy.

Pressing Issues to Address: High-Density Challenges and O&M Difficulties

Amid the bustling crowds of the airport, every flight departure and arrival is a true stress test for network capacity. As Oman Airports pursues its digital transformation, it has come to deeply understand the pain points and demands from frontline operations. These challenges fall into two main categories.

• Challenge 1: Lack of high-quality experience assurance

With the recovery of the air travel market, daily passenger traffic at Oman Airports has already exceeded 40,000 travelers and continues to grow steadily. During peak hours, large crowds flock to the terminals. Especially just before departures, passengers usually congregate around boarding gates and other specific areas, forming high-density user groups.

However, the legacy Wi-Fi 5 infrastructure struggled with performance bottlenecks. In these crowded zones, congested channels and limited bandwidth caused frequent lag for connected passengers. Flight status updates failed to load, video calls dropped, and online entertainment kept freezing. These seemingly minor "network hiccups" directly undermined overall passenger satisfaction with airport services.

• Challenge 2: Urgent need to improve operations and maintenance (O&M) efficiency

To ensure Wi-Fi coverage, most access points (APs) at the airport were installed more than 15 meters high on overhead grids. While this deployment expanded the coverage range, it also introduced new issues: Signals attenuated significantly by the time they reached the ground, and interference zones between APs were difficult to control.

Worse still, conventional network O&M relied heavily on manual expertise. When faults occurred, technicians often had to manually obtain and analyze packets, and sometimes even climb up to the APs to troubleshoot. Locating even a simple network issue could take over 12 hours on average. Besides the high maintenance costs, there were serious safety risks due to working at heights.

For a large organization operating four airports, this O&M model was far too inefficient.

When Wi-Fi 7 Meets AI-Powered O&M

In the face of these challenges, Oman Airports needed a complete technological transformation rather than patchwork fixes. After multiple rounds of rigorous technical verification and comparison, Oman Airports ultimately selected Huawei's Xinghe AI High-Quality 10 Gbps Campus Network Solution. Leveraging Huawei's deep technological expertise and profound understanding of industry use cases, the solution effectively addresses the pressing network pain points through technology innovations.

• Technical breakthrough: From good enough to best in class

Oman Airports adopted Huawei's next-generation flagship AP—AirEngine 6776-57T. This AP is equipped with smart antenna technology that uses beamforming algorithms to precisely control signal directions. Even with APs mounted 15 meters high in the terminal halls, passengers on the ground can still enjoy full-strength signals.

In addition, Oman Airports introduced Huawei's exclusive 3D network planning technology that can precisely model the airport's complex architectural structures before AP deployment. This ensures seamless wireless coverage without blind spots or interference, while easily handling the concurrent traffic pressure in high-density scenarios.

• Redefined O&M: From passive response to proactive assurance

Oman Airports deployed Huawei's iMaster NCE-Campus, an intelligent O&M platform that equips the airport network with a "smart brain" for visualized resource management across the entire network.

The airport also picked Huawei's innovative user journey playback technology to tackle long-standing O&M pain points. This technology can play back a user's entire network access process. With just one click, technicians can trace faults directly to their root cause, cutting troubleshooting time from hours to minutes.

Even more notably, the airport adopted Huawei's AI-powered optimization technology to monitor the signal strength and interference of high-mounted APs, as well as automatically adjust parameters in real time. With no need for engineers to manually troubleshoot at heights, the network always operates at its optimal state.

Building the World's First Wi-Fi 7 Airport and Setting a Global Benchmark for Airport Networking

The solution delivered immediate business benefits, driving a qualitative leap in Oman Airports' digital transformation.

• Full-scale high-speed coverage reshapes passenger experience.

The solution successfully extended coverage to more than 1 million square meters across the four airports of Oman Airports, creating the world's first Wi-Fi 7 airport network. Both passengers and airport staff now benefit from ultra-fast connectivity. Even in traditionally congested areas such as check-in counters and departure halls, the network now delivers smooth video calls and lag-free HD streaming, for over one hundred concurrent users.

• Doubled O&M efficiency unlocks management potential.

With AI-driven analytics, the system automatically identifies issues and provides remediation suggestions. O&M staff no longer have to manually troubleshoot at heights, and the average fault locating time has been reduced from over 12 hours to just minutes. As such, overall O&M efficiency has improved by 90%.

Shaping the Future with Endless Connections, Co-Creating a Digital Aviation Ecosystem

The collaboration between Oman Airports and Huawei is not merely a network infrastructure upgrade, but a key milestone in the digital transformation of the aviation industry. It reflects Huawei's vision of "Building a Fully Connected, Intelligent World" and underscores Huawei's strong presence in the aviation sector. More importantly, it reaffirms Huawei's commitment to advancing digitalization in aviation through technological innovation together with global partners, making every airport smarter and more convenient.

In the digital era, connectivity is power. The successful practice at Oman Airports has set a replicable and scalable benchmark for the global airport industry. Looking ahead, Oman Airports is well positioned to stay at the forefront of the industry, welcoming travelers from across the globe with greater openness and smarter services and writing a new chapter in digital aviation.