Why do we need 5G-A?

In today's article, I want to talk to you about 5G-A, which is 5G-Advanced. Or, 5.5G.

Recently, everyone should have noticed that there are more and more topics surrounding 5G-A, and the attention continues to rise.

The reason is simple. 2023 is about to end and we are about to enter 2024. A major event in the communications industry in 2024 is that the 3GPP R18 version will be frozen.

I have told you before that 5G is actually divided into two stages: R15-R17 is the first stage, and R18-R20 is the second stage.

The technology in the second phase has significant enhancements and improvements compared to the first phase, but it is not 6G, so it is called the 5.5G phase.

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In April 2021, 5.5G was officially named 5G-Advanced by 3GPP, and the relevant standardization work was launched. According to the established plan, the R18, which is about to be frozen, will be the first official version of 5G-A and the debut of 5G-A. Therefore, the entire industry is paying so much attention to it.

So, 5G-A is about to debut. Will it be greeted with flowers and applause?

Frankly speaking, not entirely.

As we all know, China officially started commercializing 5G in 2019. After four years of construction, we have built 3.215 million 5G base stations and more than 754 million 5G mobile phone users. (Data as of November 2023)

In terms of industrial application implementation, the achievements are also very impressive. At present, there are more than 8,000 "5G+Industrial Internet" projects in China, more than 1,800 5G factory projects, and 5G industry applications have been integrated into 67 major categories of the national economy, with more than 94,000 application cases.

In vertical industries such as industry, mining, electricity, and ports, 5G applications continue to emerge, helping a large number of companies to improve quality, reduce costs, and increase efficiency.

Despite this, there are still some doubts about the development of 5G in society. Many people believe that the investment in 5G construction is huge, but there seems to be no popular applications and the return rate is insufficient. Some people even think that 4G is completely sufficient and 5G is not needed.

Against this background, our efforts to develop 5G-A are even less understood.

To be honest, I once had doubts about the technical research significance and commercial value of 5G.

After a long period of thinking, observation and communication, I gradually realized the necessity of developing 5G.

In recent months, I have participated in a series of local digital construction inspection projects such as "Digital Yunnan", come into contact with a large number of front-line enterprises, and communicate face-to-face with many users, which has strengthened my support for 5G.

Two days ago, I attended the World 5G Conference held in Zhengzhou. At the 5G-A media salon held at the same time, I had face-to-face communication with industry enterprises such as Wanhua Chemical Group, Haier, Great Wall Precision, and Shaanxi Coal Intelligent Technology, representatives of experts from the three major operators, and industry chain enterprises such as TD Tech, Xiamen Four-Faith, Boao Automation, Zhenxiang Technology, Kunrui Electronics, and Aolan Technology, which gave me a new understanding of 5G-A.

Next, I will talk to you about why we need to develop 5G-A.

Driven by user needs

Demand has always been the main driving force behind technological development. Without demand, there will be no application. No matter how advanced the technology is or how high the indicators are, there will be no success.

People often say that 5G has no blockbuster applications and that users have no demand for 5G.

In fact, the reason for this view is that many people still use the same thinking about consumer Internet in the 3G/4G era when looking at 5G.

Consumer Internet is actually the digitalization of life. The success of 4G is due to smartphones. With the improvement of mobile Internet speed, people can chat, shop online, watch videos, play games with smartphones, and enjoy the convenience and happiness brought by digital life.

5G serves both the consumer Internet and the industry Internet. On the consumer Internet side, there is indeed no demand for blockbuster products, so C-end users cannot perceive the value of 5G. Coupled with the irrational hype in the early stage, the greater the expectations, the greater the disappointment, forming negative emotions.

The complexity of industry Internet far exceeds that of consumer Internet. We often say that there are "thousands of industries", and each industry has its own diverse work scenarios, which cannot be solved by simply selling a set of hardware and software, or selling traffic like consumer Internet.

The market cultivation cycle of the B-end is much longer than that of the C-end. It is extremely difficult for the phenomenal hits of the C-end to appear on the B-end.

For enterprises to achieve digitalization, they need to do top-level design, change organizational structure and business processes, customize scenarios, and select technologies. This process is extremely long, and it is not appropriate to measure it by the standards of consumer Internet.

So, do enterprise customers have demand for 5G and 5G-A?

The answer is: Yes.

Over the past four years, a large number of 5G deployments have been carried out in vertical industries, and some problems have been discovered, including performance deficiencies and blind spots in scenarios, which has driven the birth of 5G-A.

Since the beginning of this year, some companies have carried out 5G-A pilots and given preliminary evaluations of them.

Wanhua Chemical Group, headquartered in Yantai, Shandong, has launched more than 1,000 5G equipment terminals, realizing various application scenarios such as remote equipment monitoring, unmanned warehousing and logistics, personnel positioning, production area safety monitoring, and unmanned driving.

They now use RedCap-based wireless cameras, which eliminates the trenching and cable laying work required for traditional wired cameras (construction in chemical parks has strict requirements and a complicated approval process), without any loss in picture smoothness and clarity, and the overall cost is reduced by more than 60%.

RedCap Camera

In their production area and equipment area, there are a large number of instruments and meters that need to collect various data and send back in real time. They plan to combine RedCap with the instruments to complete these tasks.

RedCap has obvious advantages over traditional 5G in terms of weight reduction, power consumption and cost. According to data provided by TD Tech experts at the media salon, the price of RedCap modules has dropped significantly to more than 200 yuan, which is 100-200 yuan cheaper than standard 5G modules. In the future, as the industry chain becomes more mature and shipments increase, prices will drop further.

In terms of power consumption, it has been reduced to about 2W, which just meets the index requirements of explosion-proof terminals for chemical products.

Hangzhou Aolang is a company engaged in medical information technology, and they also use RedCap. They cooperated with Huawei and adopted RedCap technology to build a medical network for existing hospitals to meet the needs of data collection, video transmission, nursing and logistics services, saving wiring workload and costs.

In a certain city in Zhejiang, the local health commission built a unified data collection platform, and each hospital collected and reported information. Originally, they used Wi-Fi, but the network was too complicated and the security did not meet the requirements. After switching to RedCap, the network was established smoothly, and the cost and security requirements were met.

In addition to RedCap, let’s take a look at an example of a 5G-A uRLLC scenario.

Great Wall Precision is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Great Wall Motors. Based on the group's digital needs, they launched a pilot verification of "5G-A+Industrial Internet" and jointly explored the introduction of 5G communication in the core layer of factory production control to achieve wireless to wired replacement.

They spent two years to build a 5G ultra-reliable, low-latency, flexible door welding line at Baoding Jinggong Automation. The traditional production site is controlled by bus. They are the first in the industry to use 5G to replace the current Profinet network cable.

After the transformation, they solved multiple pain points.

First, factory equipment is diverse and comes from different manufacturers, and the protocols of different manufacturers are also different.

The factory's network has a pyramid-shaped architecture, with independent wiring for data collection and industrial control, and the diversity of bus standards, which makes it easy for information islands to appear.

Second, the industrial network on site has many layers, many cables, and many faults. This is especially true for mobile applications in production, such as the robot arms in the workshop, including slides and turntables, which are equipment related to flexible production. Long-term operation will cause bus wear and failure.

If a failure occurs, it will cause the line to stop and cause losses (hundreds of thousands to millions per minute).

It is also difficult to troubleshoot because we don’t know whether it is a device or bus problem. If a few wires in the bus are broken, data packets will be lost, which is difficult to handle.

Third, the construction period is long and the cost is high.

Great Wall is a car company, and its models are updated very quickly. Every time it updates, the production line will be reorganized or rebuilt. At this time, the wired network needs to be rewired, the construction period is very long, and the equipment placement is also inflexible.

Based on the above pain points, they decided to adopt 5G.

5G uRLLC Industrial Control Demonstration

According to their statistics, a single factory can reduce network failures by about 60 hours per year. Wireless instead of wired, the cycle time is increased by 1 to 1.5 seconds, and the production capacity value is increased by about 800 million per year. The introduction of new models can also be advanced by 10 to 15 days.

The reason for using 5G instead of Wi-Fi is that 5G has native features in terms of network hard slicing, 5G LAN, etc., which can better guarantee QoS and integrate with the factory's digital system.

Let’s take a look at the demand and applications of 5G-A ultra-wideband.

5G-A has a downlink speed of 10 Gigabits (10 Gbps) and an uplink speed of 1 Gigabits (1 Gbps), which is also a required indicator in many industry scenarios.

Shaanxi Coal Intelligent Technology is a company specializing in the application of 5G technology in coal mines. Together with China Telecom and Huawei, they launched 5G-A mining base stations in Shaanxi Coal, which achieved very good results and won the title of the annual benchmark demonstration case of the 2023 China 5G+ Industrial Internet Conference of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology.

Their Caojiaban Coal Mine Project used three features of 5G-A at once.

First up is the big upside and RedCap.

The country is now promoting smart mines, unmanned mines and reduced manpower. This has led to a large increase in the number of front-end sensing devices deployed in actual work scenarios. The number of devices that need to be connected to a single 5G base station underground has increased.

There are a large number of high-definition images that need to be collected and transmitted underground, and RedCap is used. There are many cameras, and there is a demand for large uplinks. The stronger the uplink capability, the fewer base stations are needed, which is also conducive to reducing construction and cost investment.

It is worth mentioning that there is a lot of gas in coal mines, which is flammable and explosive. In the past, traditional base stations were installed in the mine by adding explosion-proof shells, which were bulky and complicated to install. Now, the mine-use intrinsically safe base station they developed is small in size, meets regulatory requirements, and is very easy to install, which is conducive to the use of 5G-A in coal mine scenarios.

Mine intrinsically safe base station

The third 5G-A feature used is synaesthesia.

There is a lot of dust in coal mines, and it is difficult to identify objects through cameras. With the help of 5G-A intersensory integration, the road recognition rate reaches 95%, which can improve the safety of 5G underground.

5G synesthesia is now a very popular research direction and can be used for tracking and positioning, ranging and speed measurement, and imaging recognition.

Now many cities (such as Shenzhen) are developing low-altitude economy. Synaesthesia is very effective in managing low-altitude drones and can protect the low-altitude economy.

Finally, let’s take a look at P-IoT (Passive IoT), which is the passive Internet of Things.

The function of P-IoT is somewhat similar to RFID, but based on the 5G technology system, the coverage range is greatly increased. Traditional RFID covers a maximum of 20 meters. If it covers a large area, it will not only increase the cost but also cause mutual interference.

The coverage capability of P-IoT far exceeds that of RFID, and it can interact with the larger network to facilitate management and improve efficiency.

Haier has introduced P-IoT in its raw material logistics management. They have built a digital base that links tens of thousands of material types. Based on the passive interconnection capability of P-IoT tags, they have not only improved the capabilities of positions, warehouses, and suppliers, but also achieved the integration of information flow, physical flow, and value flow.

They have truly achieved full-node information visualization and have maximized their information capabilities.

At the media salon, many companies shared their 5G-A implementation practices. Due to space limitations, I will not introduce them one by one.

From these sharings, we can feel that 5G-A truly provides them with a more efficient and cost-effective solution. Behind them is the strong demand for digital transformation in thousands of industries and a real desire.

The inevitability of technological competition

Just now, we introduced the benefits of promoting 5G-A from the perspective of user needs.

In fact, from a macro perspective, the reason for developing 5G-A is also the need for independent scientific and technological research and development and national competitiveness.

The future is the digital age. Connectivity represented by 5G and computing power represented by AI and cloud computing are the country's core competitiveness.

In the field of communications, we have spent decades, gradually moving from lagging behind to leading, which is not easy to come by. Scientific and technological research and development is like sailing against the current. If you don’t move forward, you will fall behind. If we give up the research of 5G and 5G-A, we will lose this competitive advantage. When the explosion is about to happen in the future, we will fall behind again.

In terms of computing power, the fact that we are so passive in chips is proof of this.

5G, 5G-A, and the future 6G are the inevitable path for the development of mobile communications. The mobile communication network is a large unified network that must be both technically inclusive (5G eMBB, RedCap, NB-IoT, etc.), spatially expanded, and functionally extended.

It is of great significance to achieve global leadership in this area and maintain our advantage.

From another perspective, we can also use our advantages in communication technology to reversely penetrate into various industries and help break the foreign monopoly in traditional industries.

In short, firmly grasping the advantages of 5G technology will enable us to gain an advantageous position in future competition. This strategic value is worth our long-term vision.

Misconceptions about 5G-A

In developing 5G-A, we also need to clarify several misunderstandings.

At the World 5G Conference, Academician Wu Hequan mentioned several key points:

First of all, 5G-A is not intended to completely replace 5G, so there is no waste of investment as everyone imagines.

Secondly, 5G-A covers all scenarios and will only be built where needed, so the total investment is not that large.

Third, the 5G-A network side is basically implemented through software upgrades, so the engineering difficulty is not that complicated and the cost will not be that high.

These key points clarify the public's misunderstandings about the cost of 5G-A and can dispel many concerns.

Telecommunications investment, like high-speed rail, is an infrastructure investment. The benefits and returns of the operators themselves are one aspect, but more importantly, the support for enterprises and industries, and the contribution to social development, must be taken into account.

Only when the network is good can more applications be incubated, the digital divide can be bridged, individuals and businesses can benefit, and the digital economy can be driven to take off.

Conclusion

In recent days, there has been a wave of news about 6G in China. The IMT-2030 Promotion Group of the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology has released a series of progress in 6G, which has given us a better understanding of 6G.

According to the plan, 6G is expected to be commercially available in 2030, which is still 7 years away. During these 7 years, we need to enhance 5G through 5G-A and test the waters for 6G.

Patiently and firmly promoting the implementation of 5G-A will lay a solid foundation for the future 6G.