5G is both an opportunity and a pressure.
Editor’s note: This article is from WeChat public account “Note Man” (ID :Notesman), author Dai Hui, finishing Zhu Bao, cover design & editor Ma Chang.
Content Source: On August 14, 2019, in the “Bo Shi • Benchmark Micro Classroom” hosted by Bo Shi Education, the world’s leading communication technology research experts, Huawei 16 years veteran, successive Mr. Dai Hui, the chief marketing officer and investment director of Huawei Mobile, conducted a wonderful sharing entitled “How to Seize New Opportunities in the 5G Era”. As a partner, Note Man is reviewed and approved by the organizer and speaker.
Notes invite you to think before reading:
-
In addition to 5G, what is the difference between 3G and 4G?
-
What business innovation can 5G bring to us?
1. Take the history of 3G as a guide, see the future development of 5G
5G will be a great technology or a failed technology?
For 5G, the biggest concern for everyone is: 5G investment is so big, what business can be used for? If there is no business, is it equal to the investment?
Some people think that 4G is enough, so is 5G unnecessary? I will answer the 5G question for you today.
What does 1.5G borrow from 3G?
We will review history first.
3G is hard to develop because there are two problems –
First, the biggest problem is that mobile phones are expensive and have few types. This is the key reason.
From basic technology (2000) to mobile phone commercial (2003), it took three years. I was the head of the Huawei booth at the “Cannes 3GSM Show” (now called “MWC”) in early 2003. At that time, Ericsson and Nokia just launched a mobile phone; Ericsson humiliated and negotiated with Qualcomm because Qualcomm made a 3G mobile phone chip.
In 2003,I also wrote an article “Let 3G Go Down the Altar”. The article mentions: If the (low-end) 3G mobile phone can reach 100 US dollars (then RMB 800), 3G will become popular.
Until recently, the voice (Notes Note: Voice Holdings, one of the world’s major mobile phone suppliers) listed, 2G, 3G, 4G support smart phones, shipping price of less than 500 yuan.
Second, the profit model is developing too slowly.
In 2008, Apple invented the APP model. Despite the difficulties, 3G eventually became a great technology that changed our entire life.
In the process of 3G development, there are two lessons.
When the 3G was tendered in Europe in 2000, it was very hot. Before the IT bubble burst, the five 3G licenses in the UK sold more than 50 billion yuan: there are five operators in a country, and the competition is very fierce. Merchants have to pay an additional license fee of more than 10 billion yuan.
In addition, the government also requested that more than 95% of the nationwide cities be covered in a few years, which will bring huge financial pressure to operators.
The development of China’s 5G draws on the lessons of 3G in the past, removing expensive license fees and mandatory continuous coverage requirements, making the 5G deployment cost pressure less difficult.
It took less than a year from the maturity of technology to the mass launch of 5G mobile phones. In the next two years, the price of a (low-end) 5G mobile phone is likely to reach 1,000 yuan.
Huawei, Samsung, Qualcomm, MediaTek, Spreadtrum, etc. all launched 5G mobile phone chips, which is much faster than the 3G era.
So, in China, operators can go light and deploy 5G base stations in the right places.
After the network is covered, it can meet your growing traffic needs. New business has developed.
2. The number of 5G base stations will not be several times more than 4G
The number of base stations is not as much as you think when deploying 5G. There have been rumors that the number of 5G base stations will be 4-5 times more than 4G. This is a wrong understanding.
5G has two frequency points, low frequency point (cm wave) and high frequency point (millimeter wave); in fact, the coverage characteristics of low frequency point are not much different from 4G.
China Mobile adopts 2.6GMHz, and builds 5G base stations at this frequency, and its coverage is the same as 4G; even the basementIn the tunnel, where the indoor distributed antenna is used for indoor coverage, there is no need to increase any investment, and the 4G infrastructure can be reused.
Telecom and China Unicom use 3.5GMHz, which is higher than the current 4G 2.6GMHz, but the difference is not big. Telecom and China Unicom will jointly build a network, and the site is likely to be almost the same.
The 5G era also has a new operator, China Radio and Television. China Radio and Television has received a 700MHz frequency, which has low spectrum, long coverage and strong depth coverage, and is suitable for large-area network coverage.
The United States uses a low-frequency point of 700MHz on 4G. The coverage of this frequency is very good and the coverage is very good. This is also one of the important reasons for the development of the US mobile Internet.
China Radio and Television’s 5G base station uses the 700MHz frequency band. It is likely to cooperate with the company to use the currently widely distributed tower resources, which may cover dozens of kilometers in rural areas, stronger than the previous 3G and 4G.
Therefore, in China, there is no such thing as a number of base stations with 5G more than 4G, which is a typical misleading.
3. From 3G to 4G, changed our lives – Japan’s consumer electronics group is extinct, China’s rise
The United States is a very worrying and forward-thinking country. In the past many years, many information technology revolutions have been initiated by the United States. It is a very innovative country, especially in Silicon Valley.
In 2007, Jobs launched the Apple mobile phone, which is of great significance to the United States, China, and even the world. Apple phones are manufactured leanly in China and are essentially products of cooperation between the United States and China.
Before the birth of the Apple mobile phone, there were still a large number of Japanese consumer electronics products on the market, such as digital cameras, camcorders, SLR cameras, etc., and after the emergence of Apple mobile phones, these consumer electronics products almost disappeared, or the market became very small.
The contribution of Jobs to China is enormous. We have no doubt about this, including Mr. Ren Zhengfei. Jobs’s successor, Cook, has just served as chairman of the Advisory Board of the School of Economics and Management at Tsinghua University!
Steve Jobs not only invented the smartphone, but also defined the APP mode to develop various apps on Apple’s IOS operating system. There are nearly a few million apps around the world that have changed our lives.
The outbreak of the great invention of APP made 3G traffic become useless at once, because everyone is desperately using the data service of APP, so 4G technology came into being. In a sense, 4G is the 3G undertaking.
4G is a relatively simplified technique that circumvents some complex issues. For the first time, Chinese companies have basic patents in mainstream standards. Huawei can also receive patent license fees from Apple and Samsung each year.
The United States adopted 700MHz frequency points in 2010, and the coverage characteristics are very good, so the US mobile Internet is rushing forward and going global. (China is densely populated and the station distance must be small, so 2.6GHz is used)
Although 4G evaded Qualcomm’s CDMA patents for a period of time, Qualcomm later acquired some companies with core technologies (such as Flarion), so they rebuilt their own patent pool and re-emerged as a strong global company.
The smartphone industry is booming, but mobile phone manufacturers all over the world have to pay Qualcomm’s Qualcomm tax to each of them. Every mobile phone Qualcomm has to pay about 5%.
Apple is not willing to pay Qualcomm so much money, so the recent models no longer use Qualcomm chips, but painstakingly support Intel, and recently even its mobile phone baseband chip business acquisition. However, under normal circumstances, Apple has a long time to do 5G chips.
Recently, Ren Zhengfei shouted, selling 5G technology to American companies, Apple should have just needed.
In the process, the mobile Internet has rushed forward and the digital economy has developed. The United States has become the strongest in the world. This is also the reason why China and the United States can get along with each other in the 4G era.
Second, 5G hidden opportunities
The 5G standard has two core drivers: the first is to meet the needs of the Internet of Things, driverless, industrial control, etc. The second is that 5G can redistribute the benefits.
1.5G can undertake the traditional traffic demand of 4G
At the beginning of 4G, it was the huge traffic demand that directly came to 3G. Now that 3G and 4G are gradually saturated, 5G will also undertake the entertainment needs of ordinary people and meet the growing traffic demand of ordinary people.
Beijing Mobile is the first operator in the country to propose continuous 5G coverage in Beijing. Because people from all over the country have certain economic strength, most of them go to meetings and participate in exhibitions. Traffic demand.
China and other East Asian countries are countries with high population density, strong personal consumption power, and large demand for traffic. 5G will have good development opportunities.
If China does not work hard, 5G is sad, industryThe chain is difficult to mature, and it will fall into the hardship of 3G.
What business opportunities does 2.5G bring?
The small video business has grown bigger in 4G, and no one has thought of it before. On the Internet, the future is likely to form a three-legged situation in Tencent, Ali, and today’s headlines (+vibrate).
Can 5G also have revolutionary new business?
5G has three characteristics:
-
Great traffic, good real-time performance;
-
High reliability;
-
The connection is stable and provides transmission quality assurance.
Everyone predicts a lot of 5G services, such as IoT, driverless, virtual reality, augmented reality, smart manufacturing, smart internet and so on. Some people call the “5GABC” (5G, AI artificial intelligence, BigData big data, Cloud cloud) era and the “AIoT” (artificial intelligence + Internet of Things) era.
The future of 5G business is likely to grow well in China because China has good coverage, an innovative atmosphere, a dense population, a large number of factories, and a huge number of cars and highways. In addition, our infrastructure construction capability is also the highest in the world.
We are full of confidence that a revolutionary business based on 5G will surely come and change the world.
In the construction of 5G, people are currently expecting the most unmanned driving. But if the real driverless (L5) does not reach a high level of safety, the driverless company will certainly go bankrupt due to the payment of traffic accidents.
After the 5G infrastructure is built, for example, cameras are installed along the roads. All the way is a variety of sensing means, traffic lights and car networking, all of which are artificial intelligence platforms for huge calculations. Cloud computing reduces the need for local computing in the car, which can reduce the price and energy savings of the car.
The 5G-based driverless is likely to be the largest revolutionary application that will make 5G a major technology for the benefit of mankind and the changing world economy.
3. Development of artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence has three characteristics:
-
To have a large number of samples, there are huge samples in China;
-
There is a strong demand and market, China has;
-
There is a good computing power. At present, the platform of AI’s server platform and mobile phone is 7 nanometer technology. In the future, it may provide more powerful computing power for the security platform. This is also true in China.
Artificial intelligence, needIt is necessary for these three elements to jointly promote development.
The core algorithm of artificial intelligence was promoted in North America, led by Canada; but the AI industry is now growing very fast in China.
4.5G and Sino-US Relations
5G is a huge increase (information high-speed rail), and it has also changed the pattern of interests, which is beneficial to both China and the United States.
4G has been applied for nearly 10 years (the United States applied 4G in 2010), Qualcomm will not be able to continue to collect money in the future (patent expired), and smartphone shipments have gradually declined.
Now the information industry is in a state of high stock market value throughout the world. Apple has surpassed trillions of dollars to become the first stock in the US stock market.
In this case, continued growth becomes more important. If everyone is satisfied with 4G, where does the new growth come from? That will lead to a decline in the growth of many companies, and the stock price has also fallen sharply, especially for US companies.
If there isn’t a new 5G standard coming out, so many companies in the interest chain can’t continue to make money.
This will fall into the stock game between China and the United States, which is also a big background for technological friction.
The development of 5G information technology itself has the appeal of many enterprises’ interests:
After the birth of 5G, patents were redistributed. Everyone in the United States, China, and Europe got a share. Qualcomm can continue to charge global personnel. Mobile phone companies can also promote the next generation of mobile phones and create a huge market for ordinary people. .
The new technology will bring a new market space and bring a new pressure.
The rapid development of 5G is in line with China’s interests and is in line with US interests. Let’s move forward together.
In the field of information technology, now China and the United States are a state in which you have me and you have me, which is inherently difficult to separate.
Between China and the United States, one is proud and the other is damaged.
North America has a good ability to innovate. China has better industrial development needs and motivation, and both sides can cooperate better.
This is my point of view today. Thank you.