China's sea! The sea breeze brings the "taste" of 5G!

During this year's National Day holiday, Hong Kong welcomed the National Day Victoria Harbour Fireworks Display after a five-year absence.

At 9pm on October 1, the "HKT x FWD 2023 National Day Fireworks Display" was staged over Victoria Harbour. In 23 minutes, more than 30,000 fireworks were set off. Unlike previous Victoria Harbour fireworks shows, in order to allow more people to enjoy this performance, the organizer used aerial photography + 5G for the first time to broadcast the entire show.

The question is, how can we get 5G signals on the sea surface of Victoria Harbour? The local operator’s solution is to use 5G base stations on ships and drones to coordinate the air-ground 5G base stations to temporarily build a three-dimensional 5G network on the sea surface.

This scene is very special. In most places in the world, 5G networks are still concentrated in urban centers. However, China's 5G network has overflowed the land and extended to the sea.

After five years of 5G commercialization, China has built the world's largest 5G network and explored a series of innovations in 5G technology, scenarios and business models. If you ask, where can you most intuitively appreciate the differences of China's 5G?

My answer is: in the sea of ​​China.

Chongming Island, a 5G waterway

The seemingly boundless sea surface is actually divided into various areas. Among them, the waterway has the most dense traffic and the strongest demand for mobile communications.

Chongming Island is far away from downtown Shanghai. The residents on the island rely heavily on ferries to travel to the city and tourists to Chongming Island. Especially for many residents who need to commute to Chongming Island every day, they will spend a lot of time on the ferry. Previously, the Chongming waterway faced problems such as weak mobile signal coverage on the sea surface and strong interference from natural factors. After the cruise ship starts, tourists will soon enter a mobile communication blind spot where they cannot make smooth calls, play games, or watch videos.

In order to solve this problem, Shanghai Mobile cooperated with Huawei to achieve the world's first AAU double-splitting contiguous deployment, and applied multiple 5G innovative solutions such as multi-frequency coordination, R16/R17 coverage enhancement and intelligent optimization methods to solve the problems of strong interference in Chongming waterway and long distance of base stations. Finally, the overall route was covered with 700MHz frequency band as the base, supplemented by 2.6GHz frequency band as the main carrier of traffic, and frequency band service coordination was achieved by enabling load balancing, power sharing and other features, using various means to improve the quality of 5G services in waterway coverage.

At present, the "Nanshi Line" and "Nanbao Line" of Chongming Channel have taken the lead in completing 5G full coverage, achieving full 5G signal from Chongming Island to the urban area. The peak download rate of users within the route can reach 1.6Gbps, allowing residents and passengers on the cruise ship to enjoy a 5G network experience that is basically the same as in the urban area.

Behind the 5G coverage of Chongming Channel is Shanghai's overall attention to marine 5G. In August this year, the Shanghai Communications Administration, the Shanghai Combined Port Management Committee Office and the Shanghai Maritime Safety Administration jointly formulated and issued the "5G Network Offshore Coverage and Converged Application "5G Sea" Action Plan (2023-2024)", aiming to accelerate the promotion of Shanghai's 5G network offshore coverage and integrated application, accelerate the pace of smart ocean construction and marine science and technology innovation, and help Shanghai build a modern marine city.

Shanghai's "5G Sea-reaching" campaign is the first overall action plan in China jointly issued by the provincial information and communications industry authorities, port and shipping management agencies, and local maritime authorities to promote 5G network offshore coverage and integrated applications. It can be said to be an important step in the construction of offshore 5G. This action proposes to significantly improve the depth and breadth of Shanghai's 5G network offshore coverage and integrated applications by 2024. To this end, major operators are scrambling to promote full 5G coverage on the water in Shanghai's rivers, lakes, seas, and islands.

What is certain is that, driven by first-tier coastal cities such as Shanghai, comprehensive 5G coverage of China's coastal areas has become an inevitable trend.

Yangjiang, a 5G fishing boat

In addition to sailors and passengers, another 5G user that goes deep into the sea is fishing boats.

When fishing boats go out to sea, they face a rough ocean environment and may encounter various uncertainties. Therefore, the signal connection between fishing boats and onshore management agencies, rescue agencies, relatives and friends is a top priority in marine fisheries. Traditional satellite communication fishing boat solutions may be affected by environmental factors such as electromagnetic waves, and the amount of data that can be transmitted is low and the cost is high. Finding a more effective means of digital connection for fishing boats is an urgent task in the field of fishery management and marine safety.

5G has become an option for Chinese fishing boats. In Yangjiang, Guangdong, China Unicom Guangdong and Huawei have developed the country's first 5G marine private network + 5G digital fishing boat system solution based on the operating characteristics of fishermen in marine cities such as Yangjiang. This solution not only covers the 5G connection needs of fishing boats in the coastline and offshore areas, but also can go deep into the open sea to provide fishing boats with all-weather dynamic monitoring services in the sea area up to 61.5 kilometers away.

Based on the 5G digital fishing boat system, fishermen can call for help with one click during operations, and can also monitor the location of their fishing boats around the clock to avoid economic losses caused by fishing boats drifting away after typhoons and other weather conditions. In addition, digital fishing boats can also play a role in fishery disaster prevention and mitigation, combating illegal fishing, and fishing boat file management.

At MWC2023, the highest-level exhibition in the global communications industry, this "5G Digital Fishing Boat" project won the "5G Productivity Challenge Award" awarded by GSMA in 2023, and was included in the "Top Ten Solutions of the Sixth Digital China Construction Summit", becoming a model for the integrated application of 5G and fishery standardization.

The global recognition this system has gained demonstrates the core value of 5G: allowing mobile communications to break through boundaries, connect places that were previously difficult to cover, and protect lives.

This value outweighs all doubts and wait-and-see attitude towards 5G.

Ningbo, a 5G terminal

Two years ago, we visited Meishan Wharf at Ningbo Zhoushan Port and interviewed the IT manager and the gantry crane operator at the wharf. At that time, Meishan Wharf had already launched the 5G+ remote control solution for gantry cranes and bridge cranes. Gantry crane operators at the wharf began to switch from long-term high-altitude operations to remote control in the office. The workers interviewed at the time were very excited about this change, which was very impressive.

Today, 5G applications have been embedded in the operation of Meishan Port Area on a regular and large scale. Meishan Port has built the largest 5G private network in the country, which guarantees the operation of various 5G business scenarios around the clock. Ningbo Port has also independently developed a single-unit automated container terminal management system with a capacity of over 10 million. It is the first domestic port to realize the batch application of 5G remote-controlled gantry cranes, the first in the port industry to complete the remote control verification of 5G tire cranes and put them into regular production, the first 5G network slicing application, and the first end-to-end support for 5G uplink enhancement solutions.

This series of "5G+ firsts" has supported the continuous improvement of Meishan Port's throughput capacity, and it is expected to become the world's fourth single-unit container terminal with a capacity of 10 million TEUs.

The combination of 5G and the terminal has brought about tremendous changes to two jobs. One is the crane operator we mentioned above. The large uplink capacity of the 5G network ensures the accuracy and availability of remote control. So they no longer have to climb up to the narrow crane operation room every day and bend over 45 degrees to work for more than 8 hours. Instead, they can operate 3 cranes at the same time in the remote operation room like "playing a game", which not only improves the work experience and work safety, but also greatly improves the efficiency of the port and solves the problem of difficulty in hiring workers in the port. As of this year, the remote control proportion of gantry cranes and remote-controlled bridge cranes at Meishan Terminal has reached 62% and 72% respectively.

Another huge change comes from the port container trucks that transport containers. Meishan Port is the first port unmanned driving demonstration area in the country supported by local regulations. Through 5G+Beidou, the orderly operation of unmanned container trucks has been realized. Starting from 2022, the unmanned container trucks at Meishan Terminal began to operate without safety officers. At present, an average of 8 container trucks are equipped with one bridge crane, and the utilization rate of unmanned container trucks at the terminal has reached 100%. So far, Meishan Terminal has become the terminal with the most unmanned container trucks in the world, which can reduce the comprehensive cost by tens of millions of yuan each year.

The source of all these achievements comes from the 5G smart port strategic cooperation agreement signed by China Mobile Zhejiang Company and Zhejiang Seaport Group in September 2018. China Mobile Huawei and Meishan Port District cooperated to combine 5G network deployment with 5G port applications, and gradually expanded the operation area from the pilot.

From a cooperation, to the deployment of a device, to the application of a terminal, to the promotion of an industry, the combination of seaports and 5G actually shows how 5GtoB takes root and brings changes in China.

Why should we provide 5G to the ocean?

The sky is empty, but it can comfort people. The sea is endless, but it hides the solid internal logic of China's 5G construction.

In economics, there is a very famous spillover effect, which means that when an organization carries out a certain activity, it will not only produce the expected effect of the activity, but also have an impact on people or society outside the organization.

The development of 5G in China has already shown a very obvious spillover effect. If in the 4G network stage, we felt the network spillover from cities to villages, which brought about the huge development of live broadcasts and short videos, then 5G has begun to spill over from land to the ocean and to those non-populated areas, thus changing industries such as shipping, docks, fisheries, deep-sea aquaculture, and offshore energy.

Compared with Western countries, which build 5G based on commercial revenue and only cover major urban areas with high population density, China is actually building 5G as a social public infrastructure. Through indiscriminate and holistic 5G coverage, 5G network characteristics are developed into social resources that can be widely used by B-end and C-end users. This construction plan that pays more attention to the infrastructure and social attributes of 5G has brought significant changes in the 5G application layer, such as:

1. In terms of protecting life safety, 5G has become a public resource in China. From fishermen and herdsmen to patrol workers, more and more people have gained safety protection through 5G.

2. In terms of protecting environmental diversity, 5G allows a large number of unattended devices to be connected to the Internet around the clock. In many natural scenarios, such as marine life protection, 5G has begun to play an irreplaceable role in China's environmental protection and emission reduction. Blue sky and sea are gold and silver mountains.

3. In terms of productivity innovation, 5G has been effectively used in the upgrading and transformation of many industries. Take port terminals as an example. Traditionally, these jobs are far away from cities, with poor safety and high labor intensity. Many port cases we have visited have mentioned that it is difficult to sign ports and recruit workers. Exploring intelligent transformation through 5G technology provides low-cost and high-efficiency solutions to these problems. It is no exaggeration to say that the level of intelligence of Chinese ports has already led the world, and 5G networks have played an indispensable role in this.

The sea is a miniature of the azure blue, which condenses the overlap of wind and waves and hides people's joys and sorrows.

It is in China's oceans that you can best see the uniqueness of China's 5G and understand the ups and downs of digital China.