5G enters the “sprint” stage, vertical industry welcomes new opportunities

07/02/2019
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 5G (fifth generation mobile communication technology) "full landing" has entered the countdown. At the just-concluded China Development Forum, Wang Xinzhe, chief economist of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, said that 5G development has entered the stage of “sprinting”.

According to the timetable given by the three major communication operators, it will enter the 5G pre-commercial phase in 2019 and will be officially commercialized in 2020.

In fact, in 2019, more and more 5G messages came from our ears: 5G mobile phones are now available, Shanghai Hongqiao Railway Station is building 5G networks, and Guangdong is going to build the first 5G application demonstration hospitals...

The "fast" of 5G networks is no longer a secret, but behind the "fast", traditional industries such as automobiles, education, games, and medical care are also plugged into 5G wings, bringing new possibilities to the market and users.

The "lane" has widened and the "speed" has become faster.

More business scenarios have shifted from "terminals" to "clouds."

According to Li Wei, senior consultant of CCID Consulting Co., Ltd., the five characteristics of “high rate”, “low latency” and “wide connection” of 5G network correspond to different scene requirements: HD video live broadcast, virtual reality ( VR) and massive connections.

During the Spring Festival this year, CCTV Spring Festival Gala has already opened the "5G mode". Huawei, China Mobile and CCTV jointly implemented 5G network transmission of 4K ultra-clear resolution video. According to a report released by Intel, 5G will bring $1.3 trillion in new revenue opportunities to the global media and entertainment industry in the next 10 years.

In the automotive field, many car companies have laid out R&D in the fields of driverless and car networking early in the 4G network era. Some agencies predict that the 2020-2025, 5G network will directly drive the number of intelligent networked vehicles to 130 million.

He Zhijun, a communications expert at Xinte Electric Vehicle Industry Co., Ltd., believes that the application of 5G is related to the overall development direction of vehicle networking technology. Although it is still in the testing stage, many car companies have begun to establish access devices and clouds for communication platforms. The system framework of the calculation, the data acquisition platform of the local system, and so on.

In the research center of the research and development center of the 51VR company in Shanghai, Wang Zhipeng and his colleagues are preparing for the arrival of 5G. As a technology company that combines virtual reality, artificial intelligence technology with real estate and automobile industry, since 2015, 51VR has successively built real estate project VR visualization, automatic driving simulation platform and smart city related products.

Since the second half of last year, the cloud platform built by the company has cooperated with other companies to carry out cloud rendering tests under the built 5G network environment. The rendering of VR requires the creation of a large number of 3D models and rendering. The display of VR content on the terminal device is followed by dense calculations and rapid transfer of massive data. In the 4G network era, VR content needs to rely on terminal devices for computing and rendering. The performance of the terminal device itself and the network speed limit the presentation of VR content and the experience of human-computer interaction.

But now 5G makes the "lane" wider, the "speed" becomes faster, data and computing can be put into the "cloud platform", 5G bandwidth and speed can transmit the cloud computing results to the terminal in real time, greatly improved VR's picture quality and experience. Wang Zhipeng is full of expectations for the 5G network, because it can turn many business scenarios from “terminal” to “cloud”.

The most direct performance is that the company does not need to develop different applications based on the performance of different terminal devices. It is only necessary to develop an application on the cloud platform to enable different devices to obtain high-definition picture quality of high-performance hosts. Smooth experience.

In the past, real estate developers needed to deploy a variety of terminal devices in order to demonstrate the content of VR properties. Different terminal devices have different effects due to differences in computing power and storage. Application development in the cloud can share host resources and lower the configuration threshold of the terminal hardware devices, thereby reducing the cost of the enterprise.

"With the cloud system will be an important direction in the future," He Zhijun believes that the future value lies in data, such as vehicle system data, driving analysis data, driving image data, driving trajectory, etc., which will be generated after analysis and packaging. Secondary value. “If driving data can better analyze possible safety hazards, driving trajectory can help police network tracking, etc., but the sum of these data volumes is too large and must be backed by a powerful cloud platform.”

Communication operators take the initiative to "first move"

The virtual reality industry has been limited in development due to problems such as equipment performance and dizziness. Virtual reality stood up on the air, but did not stand firm. One real problem is that 4G networks are not good enough to support virtual reality technology.

CCID Consulting Co., Ltd. released the "White Paper on China's 5G Industry and Application Development in 2018", predicting that after the large-scale commercialization of 5G networks, the shipment of virtual reality devices will reach 10 million units. Nanjing Liaobu Information Technology Co., Ltd. uses virtual reality technology to engage in education and training. Last year, it began to cooperate with some companies to develop R&D for 5G network environment.

In the case of Rencheng, after the 5G network is pre-commercialized, some VR companies will stand up. For example, VR film and television companies that do not need too much interaction can quickly meet the needs of ultra-high-definition video viewing, but companies that produce interactive VR content may take a little longer.

At present, although many companies in the vertical industry have already released 5G product plans, Ren Cheng believes that the layout of enterprises does not necessarily have to be “preemptive”. “The progress of new products for 5G network development and the process of 5G network coverage are very high. Big relationship."

Liaobu Technology's customers are coal, oil and other energy companies, some in the second and third tier cities, according to the current 5G network pilot city planning announced by the three operators, Ren Cheng believes that it will wait until the customer's area covers 5G network signals, The new products of the enterprise can make a difference.

Ren Cheng believes that the promotion of 5G networks in the field of virtual reality is undoubted. After the popularization of 5G networks, the cost of hardware will be reduced to a large extent, and the core competitiveness of enterprises will be in content production. Some industry players are also paying attention to what new market opportunities will be brought to the traditional industry after the 5G landing.

In He Junjun's view, after the 5G network application, the vehicle-to-network communication will also be rapidly popularized, and the industrial chain such as the Internet, big data, and the Internet of Things will be formed to form an intersection, and the vehicle-mounted system will be used as a carrier to generate, for example, in-vehicle office, in-vehicle shopping, New market opportunities such as information sharing, social networking and leasing.

Last year, in the process of cooperation between 51VR and communication operators, Wang Zhipeng felt that operators were very active in cooperation with vertical industries. “In the past, operators were providing network broadband services to enterprises, enterprises doing business, operators doing operators. However, in the process of building a 5G network, operators will especially want to understand the business scenarios that the company will carry out in the future."

Wang Zhipeng told reporters that operators are most concerned about how much bandwidth and low latency the enterprise's business scenario requires, because the amount of data transmission in different business scenarios is not the same for the network environment. In fact, in the face of the characteristics of 5G, the three major communication operators have changed the past service model, and many "first movers" for the 5G future application scenario.

In 2016, China Mobile established the 5G Joint Innovation Center, which aims to build a cooperative and win-win integration ecosystem from the 4G to 5G evolution process, and the joint communication and vertical industry partners. In 2018, China Mobile launched networked UAV applications, 5G AR/VR interactive and video applications, and 5G intelligence around seven areas: smart transportation, video entertainment, industrial energy, smart city, education, artificial intelligence, robotics, and medical. 15 joint innovation applications research and demonstration of remote operations, 5G smart grid applications, 5G cloud robots.

In addition, China Unicom and China Telecom have also established 5G Innovation Centers to clarify the vertical areas to be focused on. During the two sessions this year, Chen Li, secretary of the Party Committee, Chairman and General Manager of China Mobile Shanghai Corporation, also proposed to speed up the development of 5G and vertical industry integration development plans, identify 5G key application areas such as vehicle networking, medical health, and industrial Internet, and complete product development and scale. Network test and application demonstration.

Vertical industry focuses on tariff prices and cyber security

The 5G network brings many new possibilities and brings new "pressure".

Industry sources pointed out that the number of 5G base station construction will be five times more than that of 4G networks. The cost is one of the problems that operators can't get around, and it is also a problem that downstream companies worry about.

He Zhijun believes that the development of car networking faces two "burdens" of long-term communication costs and computing power of in-vehicle systems. For example, the amount of daily information on a fully-automated vehicle may be as high as hundreds of gigabytes. How to properly digest data, transmit data, and store data is a big problem.

Wang Zhipeng measured and deployed the local application to the cloud. The expenses involved are mainly the lease fee of the cloud platform and the bandwidth cost of the network. From the perspective of the current public cloud fee, the cost of the enterprise in this area will be higher than the current one. -3 times. The popularity of 5G will drive down the network tariff, and the cost of the enterprise is expected to be further reduced.

“But whether the total cost of the enterprise is increased depends on the business model,” Wang Zhipeng pointed out. If the company changes from using a single machine to developing with a cloud platform, it can reduce the cost of investing in stand-alone devices in the past. At the same time, enterprises provide cloud data. Mining data value can also help companies increase their revenue.

Li Wei believes that with the emphasis on “speeding up and lowering fees” in recent years, the tariffs of 5G networks will gradually decrease with the coverage of the network. In his view, compared to the tariff price, the network security under the Internet of Everything in the 5G era is a more worthy issue.

Some experts have pointed out that 5G's "flat" architecture may increase the risk of cyber attacks on mobile infrastructure, which will consist of thousands or even millions of interconnected nodes that are vulnerable to attack abuse.

Li Xiaobo, an analyst at CCID Consulting's Big Data Industry Research Center, is concerned about the development of the cloud platform market. He found that at present, some powerful companies tend to build their own "private cloud" platforms rather than on the "public cloud" platform. Also for the sake of data security. "The data security risk of the public cloud is relatively large, because the company's data will be leaked once it is on the cloud platform of others." But Li Xiaobo believes that the popularization of 5G will definitely trigger explosive growth in the cloud market. Application development in the vertical industry will not only drive the market demand for public and private clouds, but the industry cloud will gradually become more and more. “Traditional industry enterprises can also transform into the role of cloud service providers, and collect information from a large number of users through the cloud for analysis, thereby providing more services to users.”

Author: Ningdi Source: China Youth Daily