Huawei’s chief strategist for the Middle East argues that today’s infrastructure falls short of supporting a true metaverse.
At present, most experiences marketed as the “metaverse” are essentially online games riding the buzz around the term. The long-term vision, however, is far more ambitious: a collection of decentralized, interoperable virtual worlds.
A full-fledged metaverse would let people carry avatars and digital items between environments, control physical devices from virtual spaces, conduct commerce, socialise, transact via verifiable digital ledgers, and perform everyday activities in immersive virtual settings. While not strictly required, virtual reality (VR) and other immersive interfaces will enhance these experiences.
Meta, following its rebrand from Facebook, has staked much of its future on the metaverse. Some investors have expressed concern that the company is placing heavy bets on the idea, expecting it to become a major revenue stream in the near term.
Comments from Abhinav Purohit, Chief Strategist for Huawei Middle East, suggest that consumers and companies may still be some way from polished, widespread metaverse experiences.
“Delivering such an experience will require innovations in areas like hybrid local and remote real-time rendering, advanced video compression, edge computing and cross-layer visibility,” Purohit said. “It will also demand spectrum advocacy, work on metaverse readiness for future connectivity and cellular standards, network optimisations, and reduced latency between devices and within radio access networks (RANs), among other advances.”
Purohit identifies three core technical bottlenecks: latency (network responsiveness), symmetric bandwidth (two-way data transfer speed), and quality of experience (sustained throughput). These constraints limit how seamless and interactive virtual worlds can become today.
“5G networks will significantly improve bandwidth, cut network contention, and lower latency, while 6G promises another order-of-magnitude improvement in speeds,” he added.
Beyond networking, Purohit notes that web3 innovations such as digital currencies and non-fungible tokens (NFTs) will be important to achieve the metaverse’s goals—providing traceable, trusted, and verifiable mechanisms for ownership and transactions.
Hardware improvements will also matter. The rollout of semiconductors built on 3nm processes in the near future will enable smaller, more powerful, and energy-efficient devices—benefits that could make mobile VR headsets and similar equipment lighter, longer-lasting, and more capable.
(Image Credit: Jon Radoff under CC BY 4.0 license)
Jonathan Hunt, Senior Creative Technologist at Wunderman Thompson, points out that the most advanced shared or simulated spaces today are typically expensive, cloud-powered systems such as Nvidia’s Omniverse, cloud streaming platforms, or big multiplayer games. These solutions rely heavily on instancing and localized grouping to scale.
Large, decentralized storage networks will also be necessary. Global compute and storage networks—illustrated by projects like Filecoin—are likely to play a role in providing exabytes of capacity and resilience that centralized data centres alone cannot deliver.
“Current internet infrastructure is unsuitable for building the fully immersive, content-streaming metaverse environment needed to let users move seamlessly from one experience to another,” Purohit explains. “Turning the vision of the metaverse into reality will require substantial investment across a convergence of technologies.”
Meeting these requirements will involve coordinated progress across connectivity standards, network architecture, edge and cloud computing, hardware design, and secure decentralized systems for identity and transactions. Only with that combined effort can the seamless, interoperable virtual worlds envisioned by proponents of the metaverse become practical and widespread.
Related: Web3 studios and sporting metaverse experiences appear to be reaching a turning point as the industry seeks scalable, interoperable solutions.
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