A visitor in front of a driverless car at Huawei's booth at Mobile World Congress 2024 in Barcelona, Spain, Feb. 28. Photo by Xinhua News Agency reporter Gao Jing.
Mobile World Congress 2024 recently concluded in Barcelona, Spain. At this "weather vane" information and communication industry event, about 300 participating Chinese companies showcased innovative products and technologies have become a dazzling scenery, bringing more Chinese wisdom and solutions to the construction of the industry ecosystem, and leading the direction of the information and communication industry.
5G-A enters its first year of commercial use.
Lifelike glasses-free 3D, driverless driving that recreates sci-fi movie scenes, and whimsical generative AI applications ......At this conference, the smart products and technological ideas exhibited by Chinese enterprises are very eye-catching. Behind these products and technologies, all require network infrastructure with higher bandwidth, lower latency, and higher security as support5G) has therefore become one of the hot spots of this conference.
By the end of 2023, more than 300 5G networks had been deployed globally, covering nearly half of the population. 5G is also the fastest growing technology of all generations, with global 5G subscribers growing seven times faster than 4G over the same period. In the past five years of commercial use, the number of 5G users worldwide has exceeded 1.5 billion. The industry generally believes that 2024 is the first year of 5G-A commercialization, and operators, industry chains, equipment, and standards will mature in 2024.
With the end of the first half of 5G development, the telecom industry is facing challenges such as 5G subscriber growth to the border, slower traffic growth, slower revenue growth, and killer applications yet to emerge. Li Qiang, general manager of China Mobile's planning and construction department, said that China Mobile will build a 5G-A business model from 2024, improve infrastructure, promote application scenarios, strengthen the industrial ecology, and strive to achieve full commercial use of 5G-A by the end of 2026.
Liang Baojun, deputy general manager of China Unicom, also said that China Unicom actively promotes the pilot and model construction of 5G-A networking. In the past year, China Unicom has achieved technological innovations such as RedCap and passive IoT, and completed the country's first 5G-A large-scale networking demonstration in Beijing in January this year, marking a new stage of 5G-A for China Unicom's 5G Capital innovation project.
As the largest exhibition area at this year's Mobile World Congress, Huawei's booth is crowded every day, with global carrier customers, industry partners, and industry professionals coming to learn about the cutting-edge and green technologies on display. At this exhibition, Huawei showcased a full range of 55G product solutions, including 5G-A, F5G-A, Net55G, etc. Li Peng, Senior Vice President and President of ICT Sales & Service, Huawei, said that for a more prosperous intelligent world, the industry is constantly putting forward high requirements for networks, such as uplink ultra-broadband, broadband real-time communication, and all-scenario IoT, to promote the rapid evolution of network capabilities to 5G-A and enable innovative application scenarios and business models. From China, the Middle East, and Europe, the world's leading operators have verified the leading capabilities of 5G-A in multiple commercial networks, covering multiple scenarios such as smart people, home connections, car connections, and venues.
In 2023, telecom operator DU and Huawei in the United Arab Emirates launched the world's first "smart home" project that uses 5G-A for the entire 5G-A power supply. The project supports different terminals such as **, live broadcast, and games, and will further increase the uplink rate, improve latency, enhance user experience, and expand applications in the future.
According to reports, in December 2021, the International Standards Organization "Third Generation Partnership Program Organization" (3GPP) identified the first batch of key technologies for 5G-A. Compared with 5G technology, 5G-A technology will increase network capabilities by 10 times, and the downlink peak rate will be increased from gigabit to 10 gigabit at the beginning of 5G, which will fully support the high bandwidth, low latency, and high possibility required by innovative services such as extended reality (XR) and glasses-free 3D. The uplink rate will be increased from 100 Gigabit to Gigabit to meet the requirements of comprehensive migration of massive data to the cloud and symmetrical experience of holographic interaction.
AI helps the 5G-A era.
To achieve the goal of intelligence in the 5G-A era, Huawei also released the first large-scale model in the communications industry at Mobile World Congress 2024, aiming to provide key intelligent technical capabilities, target service innovation, and improve O&M efficiency, and promote revolutionary network productivity.
According to Yang Chaobin, Director of the Board of Directors and President of ICT Products & Solutions, Huawei has built a large-scale model for serving the communications industry based on its more than 30 years of industry knowledge and experience. The large model gives full play to the advantages of intelligent technology and provides two types of application capabilities, namely, providing intelligent language interaction capabilities for different roles to improve the knowledge level and work efficiency of employees; For different O&M scenarios, it provides agent applications, analyzes and disassembles complex processes, and orchestrates operation plans to ensure user experience and satisfaction.
Huawei's communication model has many typical scenarios. For example, in the agile business provisioning case, the multi-modal accurate evaluation of the number release assistant realizes fast user number issuance. In the user experience assurance case, multi-objective experience assurance is achieved through the optimization ability of the large model. In the assisted troubleshooting scenario, cross-process quality analysis and dialogue-assisted processing significantly improve the fault handling efficiency. For example, Huawei technical experts said that network faults that used to take ordinary users hours or even days to solve can be solved in 20 to 30 minutes with a large model.
The release of Huawei's communication model is regarded as an important technological innovation in the communications industry, and is expected to play an important role in many fields such as artificial intelligence, autonomous driving, and factory automation. Some experts pointed out that the release of Huawei's communication model will accelerate the arrival of the 5G-A era and promote the rapid development of the industry.
In addition to Huawei's communication model, a number of Chinese companies exhibited the latest technologies and innovative products on hot topics such as artificial intelligence and cross-border integration of communications. Lenovo Group unveiled its latest portfolio of AI devices and infrastructure and solutions, showcasing its latest concept product, the Lenovo ThinkBook transparent screen laptop. iFLYTEK has released a variety of applications based on generative artificial intelligence and deep learning, covering multiple scenarios such as enterprise services, intelligent marketing, and smart human settlements, and more directly facing the use scenarios of enterprises and consumers, focusing on solving the pain points of enterprise operations and users' lives.
Grad Grad, president of the Global System for Mobile Communications Association, the organizer of the Mobile World Congress, said that Chinese exhibitors showed "absolutely first-class and cutting-edge scientific and technological strength". China has invested heavily in cutting-edge communication technology, artificial intelligence, and cross-border integration of communications, and dynamic Chinese technology companies are actively promoting the development of next-generation digital technologies, and he expects that "these efforts will continue to bear fruit".
Create more market opportunities.
Industry insiders generally believe that the low-latency and high-precision positioning capabilities brought by 5G-A technology will expand 5G application scenarios and create more market opportunities. In fact, 5G-A has been applied in many regions and industries in China.
In the Jinqiao Intelligent Connected Vehicle Test Demonstration Zone in Pudong, Shanghai, the world's first 5G-A Internet of Vehicles demonstration route is one of the typical application scenarios. The reporter saw that millimeter-wave radar and cameras were added to the roadside, and the changes in road conditions in complex traffic scenes were presented on the demonstration screen in real time, just like giving the vehicle a "God perspective"; An unmanned logistics vehicle is very eye-catching, showing the various application possibilities of the 5G-A Internet of Vehicles demonstration route. The reporter learned from the interview that the intelligent upgrade of the road means that the threshold for bicycle intelligence is lowered. In other words, on the 5G-A Internet of Vehicles demonstration route, only one 5G module is needed to enable the vehicle to reach the intelligent passing line. Compared with the previous 5G module, the cost has been reduced by about 40%, the size has been reduced by about half, and the power consumption has been reduced by about 40%, which has well solved the problem of high terminal R&D costs faced by the development of 5G industry application scale.
In Hangzhou, during the 2023 Asian Games, China Mobile Zhejiang created the industry's first immersive 3D intelligent viewing experience project. The ultra-large bandwidth and deterministic experience of 5G-A make it possible to watch the game with new technologies such as glasses-free 3D, 8K ultra-high definition, free viewing angle, and multi-game simultaneous viewing. Through mobile phones and tablets that support glasses-free 3D technology, or through the conversion of existing terminals that cost only 20 to 40 yuan to support 3D, combined with the real-time conversion of 2D film sources to 3D**, users can directly **3D version of news**, sports games and movies and television. "In the future, it will give birth to naked-eye 3D call applications, and drive the rise of a large number of applications such as glasses-free 3D short, glasses-free 3D live broadcast, glasses-free 3D games, and glasses-free 3D shopping, and promote the acceleration of the 3D Internet era. Xu Linzhong, an expert from the Network Planning Technology Department of China Mobile Zhejiang Company, said.
In Shenzhen, China Mobile Shenzhen Branch, together with Huawei and Deep EasTone Technology, launched the first batch commercial use of 5G RedCap cameras in the Shenzhen Municipal Waste Classification Project, combined with AI technology to monitor and manage the whole process of garbage sorting, which not only reduced the complexity and cost of the cameras by 50% to 70%, but also significantly improved the intelligent and refined management capabilities of the city's domestic waste classification.
In Hong Kong, from the second half of 2023, HKT will evolve to 5G-A across all bands, building Causeway Bay into a 10 Gigabit business district in Hong Kong, providing immersive shopping experiences such as AR shopping, AR navigation, and AR games, helping merchants attract new customers, increase activity and promote marketing conversion, with 300,000 AR activated users participating, nearly 1,000 merchants joining, and business district traffic increasing by 23%.
In the logistics industry, based on 5G-A passive IoT technology, the logistics management system can automatically detect the values of each logistics vehicle in the area in minutes. In the smart logistics project of Hangzhou Asian Games Village jointly built by China Mobile Zhejiang and YTO, remote digital management and scheduling tracking have been realized, and the vehicle operation efficiency has been increased by 20 times, thereby further reducing logistics costs.
In the manufacturing industry, 5G-A passive IoT technology has made Haier's intelligent warehousing inventory fully transparent, and Haier Smart Home, together with China Mobile Shandong Company and Huawei, has completed the end-to-end verification of the intelligent inventory management solution for massive materials in Qingdao Haier Smart Factory. Great Wall Precision, together with China Unicom Hebei Company and Huawei, carried out the "5G-A+ industrial control" industrial joint creation, and built the world's first wireless flexible production line in the Baoding Precision Automation Factory in Hebei Province, which has wireless connection, low latency, flexible combination of production modules, and stable high-speed operation, which shortens the service interruption time to 526 minutes, making it possible to increase the annual production capacity of automobiles by nearly 10,000 units.
Over the past 20 years, informatization and digitalization have brought trillions of dollars in strategic opportunities to the ICT industry. With the rapid evolution of network capabilities to 5G-A and the empowerment of innovative application scenarios and business models, it is expected that the global intelligent economy will exceed 18US$8 trillion brings new strategic opportunities to the ICT industry. Li Peng said. (Reporter Wu Wei Dong Xue).
*: Economic Information Daily.