Text: Huang Haifeng's correspondence life.
The construction of digital China is in full swing, and China's digital economy has recently delivered a brilliant report card. According to the data released by the State Administration of Taxation, in 2023, the sales revenue of the core industries of China's digital economy will increase by 8% year-on-year7, accounting for 12 percent of total sales revenue1％。
In the face of the complexity and uncertainty of the external environment, China's digital industry has shown important increments and active momentum, containing huge opportunities.
Digital China is becoming increasingly prosperous from high-rise buildings, which is inseparable from the foundation of digital infrastructure, involving cities, transportation, energy, water conservancy and other aspects. However, the traditional construction mode has problems such as low efficiency, resource misallocation, and lagging technology, such as railway inspectors have to inspect three kilometers back and forth every day, even if it is windy and rainy, even if they face rugged mountain roads, they are still no exception, which is very hard and inefficient.
How to solve the above problems? In 2022, Huawei, an ICT leader, established a digital site corps to build a six-layer sensing network architecture, focus on basic ICT capabilities, and deepen the three market segments of digital pole stations, digital pipelines, and digital stations, creating industry scenario-based product portfolio solutions and leading the digital intelligence of field infrastructure.
In a recent internal exchange, Huawei's digital site business revealed that it will deepen its efforts in three scenarios: smart city, smart transportation, and power stations. Here, let's step into the new world of Huawei's digital sites, analyze the logic of these three scenarios in detail, and consider what opportunities and value it brings to the industry.
Build a new type of smart city and improve the level of governance
When it comes to digital sites, the first thing that comes to mind is definitely smart cities. China has hundreds of cities, which are important units that make up the country, with a dense population, a large number of enterprises, and a good economic development, which needs to accelerate digitalization. In recent years, smart cities have developed rapidly, and new policies and regulations have been introduced in various provinces. For example, Shandong Province has included relevant plans in the key points of building a strong digital province, and Henan Province has proposed to build a livable and resilient smart city.
In the city, you will find many "poles", including power poles, traffic lights, weather poles, street light poles, base stations, etc. In order to accelerate the intensive development of cities, what is the significance of the construction model of "multi-pole integration" proposed in many places? That is, through new technologies such as 5G, Internet of Things, and artificial intelligence, the setting of "poles, electricity, networks, tubes, and boxes" is standardized. Under this wave, sharing and intelligence have become the core demands of all provinces and cities.
Based on the above trends, Huawei Digital Site has launched two product portfolios: Smart Sharing Pole Station and Pipe and Tunnel Monitoring Station. Specifically, the smart sharing pole station has applications in scenarios such as smart lighting, co-pole and common network, and urban Internet of Things, and has multi-pole combination.
1. The four major competitiveness of wireless backhaul, cloud-side collaboration, and whole-site operation and maintenance will reduce the construction and labor costs of a single site by 30% and 60% respectively, greatly improving the level of urban governance.
Previously, I paid attention to Huawei's digital site and Hebi City, Henan Province, to build a digital pole station model site that integrates edge computing, AI and other technologies, and will achieve global coverage in Hebi in the future, helping the best system to grasp the operation of urban space.
If cities want to develop at a high speed, it is crucial for "arteries" such as urban utility corridors to maintain safe operations. In order to solve the common pain points of "dumb" terminals, difficult status monitoring, multiple platforms, difficult linkage, and difficult deployment and O&M, the solution uses an innovative combination of multiple products such as hyper-convergence, computing, and HUAWEI CLOUD to build a "smart terminal, highly reliable, and easy-to-deploy" pipe and tunnel monitoring station to help realize intelligent electromechanical monitoring.
Build a smart transportation base to enable vehicles to travel smoothly on the road
With the rapid expansion of the scale of the city, traffic management is faced with pain points such as unclear vision, poor control, and inaccurate management, taking a provincial capital city as an example, even though there are more than 4,000 traffic light intersections, due to the lack of intelligent signal coordination control system, the delay index during peak hours in some areas is high.
This reflects the contradiction between the current intelligent level of traffic management and the actual needs of the metropolitan area, how to solve it?
To this end, Huawei has built a product portfolio solution for radarvision control pole stations, which provides 1,000-meter long-range accurate perception capabilities, with a perception accuracy rate of 95%, and supports more than 20 types of management and control events, helping customers achieve refined and intelligent management and control of transportation infrastructure.
At present, the security protection of critical infrastructure such as railways, airports, and oil and gas pipelines has become increasingly important, and the traditional protection system has pain points such as low manual inspection efficiency and easy destruction of physical isolation.
Huawei's "Optical Fiber Sensing and AI Upgrade" has created a product portfolio solution for perimeter protection stations, which provides full coverage, all-weather, and intelligence to help the intelligent transformation of transportation and energy artery security protection, and achieve safe and efficient operation of railways, airports, and oil and gas pipelines.
Integrate computing power and intelligent connectivity to promote the intelligent upgrade of energy stations
Promoting wind, fire, hydropower and other fields of power equipment has become the direction of green and low-carbon development and the focus of promotion. In the integration of multiple energy sources and effective grid connection, it is necessary to strengthen safety monitoring. There are many problems in the operation and inspection work of traditional stations, such as many business systems, large inspection workload, difficulty in supporting new services in the network, and difficulty in headquarters control.
Based on this, Huawei has launched a comprehensive digital station product portfolio solution to build three core competitiveness: multi-computing power convergence platform, converged network, and centralized O&M management, helping stations achieve centralized monitoring and remote O&M.
It is understood that Huawei has helped the digital transformation of more than 50 national high-voltage stations.
It is gratifying to see that Huawei's comprehensive digital station product portfolio solution has expanded from power scenarios to oil and gas, transportation, and other station scenarios, and will help more digital stations achieve intelligent upgrades in the future.
The author's observation: redefine the digital infrastructure construction model
Huawei's digital site business is an "old friend" that I have been paying attention to, providing a product portfolio for the digital intelligence of outdoor infrastructure, leveraging Huawei's advantages in the ICT field for more than 30 years to accelerate the digital intelligence of various industries.
In April last year, Huawei's digital site team brought its product portfolio solutions and sensing network system to the Digital China Construction Summit in Fuzhou, attracting the attention of city managers and people in the power industry. During the visit, I was most impressed by Huawei's smart sharing pole station, which upgrades the basic street lamp unit into a digital anchor for urban interaction, which can be called the nerve endings of the perception network system.
As we look at the digital site business at the end of the year, I'm thinking about how much value it can bring to customers in 2024.
First of all, product competitiveness is the foundation, and the product portfolio solution of digital sites is built on Huawei's super competitiveness, and can also complete efficient cross-product collaboration, so that customers can use it with peace of mind. Secondly, the goal is to help customers achieve business success, and the product solution can quickly shorten the time to launch the business by precipitating common capabilities for multi-industry scenarios. Finally, ease of deployment and O&M is a guarantee, and the product portfolio solution is pre-integrated and pre-validated, which greatly reduces the difficulty of deployment in the field.
If you want to deepen your digital site business, what are Huawei's advantages over other companies? In my opinion, what Huawei brings to the industry is not a single point of technological breakthrough and product innovation, but based on its accumulation of more than 30 years of ICT accumulation, Huawei needs to redefine the digital infrastructure construction model.
If you take a closer look, you can see that Huawei not only has core technologies such as optical sensing, computing, and AI models, but also has products such as sensing, computing, connectivity, and energy, as well as full-stack site integrated design and delivery capabilities, which can provide end-to-end support for the digital intelligence of enterprise infrastructure.
A new journey in the Year of the Dragon, and new brilliance. Looking ahead, we hope that all parties in the industry will work with Huawei Digital Sites to continue to promote the intensive, shared, and intelligent construction of field infrastructure, and achieve the goals of "intelligent and inclusive urban infrastructure, unmanned enterprise production, and intelligent upgrade of industry perception system", and contribute Huawei's strength to the construction of a digital China.