At the New Infrastructure and Business Digitalization Forum held during the first GSMA Thrive 2020 event, Mr. Gan Bin, chief marketing officer for Huawei’s wireless network solutions, delivered a keynote speech entitled "5G Brings Five Opportunities with New Value". In this speech, Mr. Gan elaborated why "5G is the digital foundation of new infrastructure to upgrade connectivity, AI, cloud, computing, and industrial applications and inject new vitality into economic development".
5G enables smart personal and home connectivity in full scenarios
"5G significantly improves the experience of connectivity, expanding 4G's people-centered connections with smartphones to a full range of scenarios that span not only smartphones, but also smart wearables and homes. This will add greater convenience to daily lives," Mr. Gan said.
Huawei's latest Global Industry Vision (GIV) report projects a per-person average possession of five smart devices by 2025. Apart from eight billion smartphones, there will be more than 20 billion PCs, tablets, VR headsets, smart watches, and smart screens among other smart devices. 5G's high bandwidth makes it possible to seamlessly switch video calls, video entertainment, and personal data across these devices. In addition, over 20 billion real-time online smart home devices, such as sound boxes, projectors, printers, and blood pressure meters will be operated and managed with 5G connections to enrich personal and home services.
As a result of 5G connections, these physical devices for homes or offices can be systematically integrated with the digital world to build new smart infrastructure platforms for consumption, education, travel, and work. This, in turn, will create new types of smart services.
5G empowers AI to benefit various industries
5G's full-scenario connectivity also facilitates the application and expansion of AI functionality.
5G eliminates data upload limitations, meaning that a massive amount of data can be transferred from hundreds of millions of devices to cloud servers to provide AI operations with tremendous data, which will greatly reduce the training period. 5G enables devices to make the best of the powerful computing in the cloud to relax requirements on local computing, reducing device costs. Furthermore, 5G enables the transfer of AI operation results to devices to greatly expand the availability of AI-based functionality.
5G will catalyze the maturity of AI technologies, playing an increasingly important role in our personal and professional lives. Technologies like real-time speech recognition, real-time machine translation, license plate recognition, and production line detection will penetrate every aspect of life and work due to ubiquitous 5G networks. Based on industry forecasts, 5G will potentially add a trillion US dollars to the AI market space by 2025.
5G boosts on-demand cloud storage and computing
"Cloud technologies and business models are maturing, with hundreds of millions of connections and availability of AI services acting as the catalyst for the rapid development of the cloud industry," Mr. Gan emphasized.
5G will stimulate the demand for massive storage worldwide. Constrained by insufficient local capabilities, less than 2% of the nearly 40 ZB data generated in 2019 was saved. 5G high bandwidth offers a new option to implement cloud storage to save the massive data. According to Huawei's GIV reports, 92% of the world’s newly created 180 ZB data will be stored on the cloud by 2025.
5G also stimulates the demand for enormous computing power. Limited by current technology, less than 10% of all data has been analyzed and applied so far. 5G enables devices to leverage powerful cloud computing capabilities anytime, anywhere. According to Huawei's GIV report, the demand for computing power in 2025 will have increased by 150,000 times compared to 2019, with data usage surging from 10% to 80%.
Cloud technology is expanding beyond the Internet industry to government services, financial sectors, and other industries, spreading across production, operations, and management procedures in various enterprises. In China alone, one million enterprises will embrace the cloud in 2020, demonstrating an inevitable trend across industries towards cloud migration.
5G drives cloud-edge device collaborative computing
Computing capabilities have evolved into a crucial extension of human capabilities. Constantly growing computing requirements are driving the development of computing models. 5G will push computing into a new intelligent era featuring efficient collaboration among cloud nodes, edge nodes, and devices. With this new cloud-edge-device collaborative computing model, the cloud end focuses on general computing for brute force processing of massive data, and the edge end specifically addresses dedicated computing demands, including ultra-low latency and security and privacy protection, while devices are responsible for implementing the computing requirements for personalized devices, such as headsets and smartphones.
"We are now facing a vast computing market with tremendous potential. Global research firm Gartner has forecast that the computing industry will exceed two trillion US dollars by 2023.
5G accelerates fully connected, intelligent business digitalization
"While 4G has changed lives, 5G is set to change society. 5G has proven an indispensable enabler for business digitalization and will greatly improve the operational efficiency across industries," Mr. Gan noted.
According to Huawei's GIV report, the contribution of the mobile industry to the world's economy is growing year by year. 5G is emerging as the major driving force, projected to produce a return 6.7 times that of non-ICT investment in the long run.
5G has developed mature use cases for smart healthcare, distance education, and smart campuses, as well as in the business, travel, and cultural sectors. In China, 5G networks have been deployed in more than 300 hospitals to support remote diagnosis, remote monitoring, remote B-mode ultrasound examinations, and many other online services, which have proven important in fighting against the ongoing pandemic. Currently, 30,000 hospitals across China have planned to introduce 5G networks within one to two years. In addition, the commercial deployment of 5G has been initiated in 500,000 school campuses, 300,000 industrial parks, 100,000 hotels, and tens of thousands of shopping malls across China.
Furthermore, many other industries are working actively to promote the integration of 5G. Examples include electrical power, mining, port, oil and gas, manufacturing, and iron and steel.
"Everyone will benefit from the opportunities brought by 5G. We call for concerted efforts across the entire society to explore business and delivery models, policy support, innovative applications, and device diversification, so as to embrace a 5G integrated world," concluded Mr. Gan.
