By Yan Lida
Ladies and Gentlemen,
Good afternoon.
There is a question I have been asked a couple of times, “for Industry 3.0, or in other words, Industrial Automation, it seems that Huawei has not been involved in that market as you are a telecom vendor. So, for Industry 4.0, what role will Huawei play?”
Excellent question!
He is absolutely right. We originated our business in the telecom sector. After 27 years’ of development, Huawei has become the world’s largest ICT product and solutions provider to telecom carriers. We now serve 1/3 of the world’s population, operating in 170 countries. Over the past 27 years we have focused on connecting billions of people. As a result, we have become world-class experts in connectivity.
Categorized by different targeted customers, we now have 3 business groups, not only the Telecom Carrier Business Group, but also the Consumer Business Group, and the Enterprise Business Group, which I’m in charge of.
By doing business within different vertical industries, we discovered the power of merging our innovative ICT technologies with customers’ unique requirements. ICT is reshaping the way business is organized and operated. ICT has become more and more a key part of the business, rather than a supporting element.
Here are two examples I would like to share with you.
Here we have a super-heavy-cargo-train, the owner of the railway is the world’ largest coal mining company. The length of the train is about 2500 meters, and needs 3 engines to drive the entire train, which are located in the middle and the 2 ends. The main issue here is how to synchronize the engines. They need to react at exactly the same time, in real-time. Huawei provides a technology called eLTE, which is based on LTE technology. This technology enables broadband data transmission, and of course the signals cover the entire railway, which can’t be accomplished with Wifi or GSM-R.
Another example is the broadcast industry. In order to support the demand for increased resolution beyond HD, new production systems must support much greater bandwidth and storage capacity. Today’s 4k video cameras create massive amounts of data that need to be quickly transferred from the field to the production studio. Production staff need to take portable hard drives on the earliest flight back to the studio, and then transfer the data manually to the editing systems. You can imagine how huge that workload is.
With our deep understanding of the customers pain points, we have developed a hybrid cloud solution. With our Media Cloud solution, all the raw video is uploaded to the cloud immediately after they are shot. The editors are able to access the cloud remotely and decide which clips should be downloaded for further editing and which clips should be just left on the cloud. This dramatically improves efficiency. Eventually, editors will be able to edit video directly in the cloud.
Not only this, but by leveraging our 3 business groups, we have tried some innovations in our smart phone production line recently. We outsource most of our production to EMS, while at the same time we keep our own production line for some high-end models. Here’s a short video, let’s see what we have done. Appearing in the video is the mate7, our most popular model so far.
This is not Industry 4.0, maybe I should just call it Industry 3.5.
Here, this is Industry 4.0, the future. What you see here is that the Internet-based System and Services Platforms and the Internet of Things are the foundation of Industry 4.0. This is Huawei’s focus.
To realize Industry 4.0, the current ICT infrastructure needs to be reconstructed. Connectivity is the key. Here is why:
First, the connection scale is vastly different. For example, there are 7 billion people living on this planet, and the scale we connect people is in the several billions. But for the Industrial Internet of Things, the devices we need to connect is in the hundreds of billions. What kind of network can accommodate so many devices with a reasonable cost?
In the context of Industry 4.0, intelligent devices talk to each other, delivering decision-critical data, and react to instructions in real time. How can we create a network with such low latency?
For Industrial Automation today, most of the data or information is transmitted and stored in a closed private network. For the new revolution, that data or information will be connected to the cloud, or even transmitted in a public network. The security concerns are natural and need to be well addressed.
The priority in building a fundamental infrastructure and set of standards, is to ensure smooth interconnectivity for the industry, illustrated by the fact that the challenges of the Industrial Internet are created by fragmented software driven applications and lack of standards within the ICT architecture.
Based on our Innovation in ICT technology, Huawei has created a Smart & Connected Industrial network that supports multi-application collaboration on distributed platforms.
5G and agile networks provide a high-quality Real-time data transmission channel, allowing smart devices to talk to each other real time. With multi-application collaboration on distributed platforms, it enables cross-region collaboration for design, production, testing, and logistics.
Finally, with our massive M2M connection capabilities. We can provide unified access to large numbers of smart devices with various interfaces via our Smart IOT gateway, simplifying interconnectivity among smart devices.
To cope with the challenges I mentioned above, cross-country, cross-industry collaborations are a must. By accumulating the technical advantages and know-how of the last 27 years, Huawei will play an important role in the future of ICT infrastructure.
In the field of sensor chips, Huawei has launched LTE-M as a mainstream solution for next generation wireless communications, based on mature industry LTE solutions. Compared to traditional wired sensor technology, it overcomes the disadvantages complicated wired solutions. Secondly, LTE-M is based on the ISM free spectrum. That allows any enterprise to deploy it freely.
Additionally, LTE-M has 1km radius coverage and 10,000 connections per cell. That means you just need to deploy one LTE-M base station to access of all the equipment, devices, and sensors in a small or medium enterprise campus.
Finally, as a professional grade sensor chip, our LTE-M chip uses very little power, enabling ten years of operation without changing the battery. This makes it well suited for complex factory environments. Compared with other wireless technologies, the advantages are obvious.
The Smart IOT gateway is a key part of the Industrial Internet, supporting various interfaces, further enabling unified access across many smart devices. With our built–in open Application gateway platform, we support customized applications for Smart Data pre-processing, enabling collaboration among different devices and smart industrial controls.
Our built-in security control chip in the M2M gateway can identify any device attempting to access the gateway to verify it is an authorized device. In addition, it ensures authentication and security of data collection as well as system command and control during transmission.
As THE leader in 5G technologies, how do we improve the future for intelligent factories? 5G delivers significant advantages in capacity and low latency. For example, 5G can support one million connections to sensors and devices within a single square kilometer, 1000 times more than 4G.
5G also delivers an amazing low latency of 1ms, 50 times better than 4G, further ensuring safe and stable device communication. Finally, 5G supports 10,000 HD camera feeds at the same time.
Our model for innovation and cooperation is to build Business-Driven ICT infrastructures, or BDII. Together with our partners, BDII will drive the development of Industry 4.0 applications by using the power of integrated ICT technologies. Based on open source technologies, Huawei’s ICT solutions are a perfect fit for building Industry 4.0 ecosystems. To date, Huawei has active relationships with more than 300 solution partners, including top-tier companies such as SAP, Siemens and Microsoft.
Now let’s look at construction equipment maintenance. Traditionally, construction equipment is maintained manually. If something breaks down, maintenance engineers have to search for the failure, sometimes for hours without any detailed insight into the problem, wasting precious time and money in the process.
With a Huawei embedded smart vehicle gateway installed in a construction vehicle, operational data can be uploaded to the big data processing platform for analysis and failure identification, predicting and correcting problems before they occur. This solution has the potential to reduce failure rates by 70% and reduce downtime from 2 hours per month to 30 minutes.
Over the course of the last 20 years, Huawei has established a leadership position in the areas of data communication standards. It is our intention to continue our participation within the global standards communities that are critical to realizing the objectives of Industry 4.0.
Huawei deeply understands that a single flower does not make a garden. Without the cooperation across the entire industry chain, Industry 4.0 will not be realized. Presently, there are organizations that have been set up in Europe, America and China, in order to move Industry 4.0 forward. Huawei is committed to nurturing our deep relationships with other leading vendors to jointly promote the creation of a vibrant Industry 4.0 ecosystem.
Ladies and gentlemen, the era of Industry 4.0 is upon us, and as you have seen and heard here today, Huawei is actively promoting an accelerated adoption of Industry 4.0 methods to create smart industry networks based on open standards.
Huawei believes that the future world is a fully connected one. We firmly believe that the Industry 4.0 revolution will make the world a better and smarter place to live and work.
Mr. Yan Lida, President of the Enterprise Business Group, Huawei, delivered this keynote speech at the CeBIT 2015, in Hannover, Germany. CeBIT is the world’s largest ICT expo.