Large-scale commercial use is imminent! What will be the future development of 5G messaging?

At present, more than 100 operators around the world have launched one or more 5G commercial services. China has built the world's largest 5G network, and 5G has entered a new stage of "high-speed and high-quality" development. On the one hand, the digital economy is developing rapidly, the value of data has been released, and the combination of 5G and various industries has produced a "multiplier effect", accelerating industrial transformation and promoting high-quality development in the three major areas of social governance, information consumption, and industrial upgrading. On the other hand, how to realize the value of 5G, cultivate "killer" services, and benefit and serve the public has become an important goal in the new stage of 5G development.

Relying on new technologies such as 5G, artificial intelligence, Internet of Things, cloud computing, big data, blockchain, computing power networks, etc., 5G messages can promote the digital transformation of the industry and accelerate the high-quality development of the digital economy.

Current status of 5G messaging development

It has been three years since the three major domestic operators jointly released the 5G message white paper in April 2020. Looking back, with the vigorous development of 5G, 5G messages have accelerated their development into basic applications for the public, domestic operators' 5G message platforms have been commercialized on a large scale, and platform operation and management have become increasingly perfect.

In terms of platform construction, the three major domestic operators have built 30 5G message nodes in 15 regions, providing services to nearly 200 million users.

In terms of industry development, domestic operators have connected with hundreds of 5G message CSPs, opened more than 100,000 Chatbots, and sent nearly 20 billion 5G messages each year. Chatbots have achieved diversified applications in many fields such as government affairs, finance, culture and tourism, public services, life services, media, medical care, and e-commerce.

During the 2022 Winter Olympics and Paralympics in Beijing, China Unicom focused on the IP hotspots of the Winter Olympics and designed and developed the "Unicom Winter Olympics" Chatbot application, which covers three major sections, namely "Winter Olympics services, communication services, and Winter Olympics fun", as well as 56 service scenarios, creating a "one-stop" Winter Olympics service platform and a new entrance for Unicom services, enabling audiences to watch games intelligently and participate in interactive activities, and providing content such as schedules, highlights, medal lists, business subscriptions, licensed merchandise purchases, and city services. On this basis, China Unicom also carried out online theme activities in combination with the hot spots of the Winter Olympics, including warm-up activities (question-answering lottery and Winter Olympics group photos) before the opening of the Winter Olympics, and a series of activities such as lottery for watching games, Bing Dwen Dwen flash sales, and the recording of Beijing Satellite TV's "Dream of Winter" after the opening of the Winter Olympics, covering 100 million users, allowing users to get to know 5G messages up close and use 5G messages.

During the National People's Congress and the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference this year, China Unicom joined hands with People's Daily to conduct digital communication, with the theme of "Starting and Leaping Forward", and launched the "Focus on the Two Sessions" 5G message experience content service for the public. The two parties used their own lightweight, strong reach, multimedia and other characteristics to strengthen the close connection between "media + communication operators + users", and used the 5G message custom menu bar and uplink and downlink interactive functions to help users quickly and easily obtain the latest meeting progress and People's Daily's high-quality content, bringing users a new 5G digital life experience.

In terms of terminal support, according to the latest report of the 5G Message Working Group (an organization jointly initiated by the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology, the China Communications Enterprise Association and related companies in the 5G message industry chain), as of May 2023, there are 309 mobile phones that support the 5G message UP2.4 standard, including 264 models of China Mobile, 23 models of China Unicom, and 22 models of China Telecom. China Mobile still accounts for the majority of models that support 5G messages. According to data from the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology, in 2022, 423 new models were launched in China, of which 220 were 5G mobile phones. From January to May this year, there were 78 5G mobile phones among the new models launched. With the increasing popularity of 5G mobile phones, more and more mobile phones will support 5G messaging functions.

Considering the current status of operator network construction, industry development and terminal support, 5G messaging already has the foundation for large-scale commercial use.

With favorable policies, 5G messaging will usher in an explosive period

In July this year, in order to support the innovative development and large-scale application of 5G messages, enrich 5G application scenarios and service supply, and promote the high-quality development of the digital economy, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology issued the "Notice on Strengthening End-to-Network Collaboration to Promote the Scale Development of 5G Messages" (Draft for Comments) (hereinafter referred to as the "Notice").

The Notice states that the transition period is six months from the date of publication, and mobile phone manufacturers should complete the system design and function upgrade of the 5G mobile phones planned to be launched in accordance with the relevant industry standards and network access testing specifications for 5G messages. After the transition period, 5G mobile phones newly applied for network access licenses by mobile phone manufacturers must support 5G messages. For 5G mobile phone models that have applied for network access before the end of the transition period, qualified mobile phone manufacturers are encouraged to support 5G message functions through product system upgrades and other means.

The "Notice" has injected strong momentum into the large-scale development and popularization of 5G messaging terminals. 5G messaging is expected to usher in "explosive" growth next year.

The combination of 5G messaging and big models brings new imagination space

As 5G messaging continues to mature, the industry is also exploring the possibility of combining it with emerging technologies, such as ChatGPT (Chat Generation Pre-trained Transformer), which is the most popular this year. The rapid popularization of 5G provides an efficient and reliable network foundation for human-computer interaction. 5G messaging Chatbot is one of the basic channels for 5G to enable toB industry applications. So what does ChatGPT mean for 5G messaging?

Chatbot is a chat robot, also known as a conversational robot. It is a general term for programs that simulate human conversations based on artificial intelligence technology. Chatbot was born as early as 1966. Eliza, developed by Joseph Weizenbaum, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was the first conversational program to chat with people. In recent years, with the rapid development of mobile communications, the Internet and AI technology, Chatbot has been widely used in the fields of the Internet, social networks and mobile communications. Among them, the most prominent application in the field of mobile communications is 5G message Chatbot.

ChatGPT is a natural language processing tool developed by OpenAI and driven by artificial intelligence technology. It is based on machine learning technology and a generative pre-trained language model of the Transformer neural network architecture. It can learn contextual information to better understand intent, emotions, and metaphors, providing people with more flexible and intelligent answers. Compared with traditional Chatbots, ChatGPT chats more naturally and smoothly, can perform detailed reasoning and generate innovative content, and its capabilities and experience far exceed those of traditional Chatbots.

In short, ChatGPT is a new generation of Chatbot in the era of artificial intelligence 2.0 with GPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformation Model) as its core technology. It can be regarded as a new application of Chatbot developed to the GPT stage. It has no specific task or field restrictions and can be used in various dialogue scenarios. Before the emergence of ChatGPT, Chatbot has been widely used in finance, tourism, education, medical care, customer service and other fields. Chatbot based on conversational AI has also become a mainstream product, but Chatbot usually has specific tasks or fields, such as customer service, intelligent assistants, etc.

The 5G Message Chatbot is based on the 5G message and adds toB capabilities on top of the toC multimedia capabilities and portals, as well as new features such as fixed menus, dynamic menus, and card messages. These features help improve the industry user experience and guide users to quickly complete transaction processing.

The advantages of 5G messaging Chatbot for toB industry applications are direct access to users, on-demand services, and strong interactivity that responds to requests. ChatGPT can be used as one of the core technologies of Chatbot, serving and enabling 5G industry applications at the fastest speed through 5G messaging. Chatbot can build a more intelligent Chatbot through the technical upgrade of ChatGPT, greatly improving the service capabilities and service levels of 5G industry applications and improving production efficiency. At the same time, with the support of plug-in capabilities, ChatGPT is deeply integrated with industry knowledge to give full play to the application value of professional data.

Figure 1: Chatbot entrance

As shown in Figure 1, based on the native entrance of the 5G messaging service on mobile terminals, users can enter the mini program with one click. The mini program is the direct entrance to the Chatbot application. Both traditional Chatbots and Chatbots that support ChatGPT can be launched and released based on the operator's 5G messaging service management platform. Users can obtain access rights through online search or QR code link scanning, and then they can chat with the robot.

From a technical perspective, Chatbot can access ChatGPT based on an open API interface to improve its intelligent dialogue response capabilities; it can also integrate modules or plug-ins such as ChatGPT based on the CSP platform; it can also directly turn Chatbot into a ChatGPT client. It is worth noting that through the continuous integration and release of ChatGPT or other AIGC capabilities through the CSP platform, the terminal does not need to be modified or upgraded.

From an industrial perspective, 5G messages and ChatGPT are the perfect combination of new mobile communications and new artificial intelligence. 5G messages will provide new value and stage for ChatGPT's industry applications.

Future development direction

With the establishment of national policies, 5G messaging will usher in better historical development opportunities. Communication is an eternal need of mankind. How to make full use of the differentiated advantages of telecommunications services, 5G network characteristics and the latest technologies to define and create a new era messaging product with core competitiveness and high value is the historical mission of operators.

In order to build 5G messaging into one of the best entrances to digital services and businesses in the telecommunications ecosystem, provide users with secure and reliable message communications, and build an integrated ecosystem and business closed loop based on natural private traffic channels to achieve the success of the 5G messaging industry, operators will need to focus on three directions in the future: improving the ecosystem, developing capabilities, and integrating innovation.

Perfect Ecosystem

Although the three major operators have built 5G messaging platforms, the 5G messages between different operators cannot be interoperable because the interoperability specifications have not yet been determined. As the number of terminals with 5G messaging capabilities increases, 5G message interoperability will become a rigid demand.

Therefore, operators should speed up the formulation of 5G message interconnection specifications to enable existing platforms to have interconnection capabilities and meet the rich media message service needs of cross-network users. At the same time, operators should subdivide existing regions, improve local service capabilities, strengthen the image of high-quality network services, and further consolidate the development of 5G messages.

Specifically, operators should build a connection and traffic base. In the 5G era of intelligent interconnection of all things, 5G messaging is an important part of the implementation of the "5G+" strategy. Operators should adhere to the coordinated advancement of "5G+4G" and "5G+large connection", and through the three steps of "mandatory network access, incentive upgrades, and standard promotion", expand the scale of connections, accelerate the coverage of 5G messaging terminals, and unify user experience.

At the same time, operators need to expand the scale of terminals and take both "quantity" and "quality" measures. First, they need to quickly increase the scale of terminals through policy guidance and market cooperation; second, they need to continuously optimize the 5G messaging service experience on the terminal side through cooperation with terminal companies.

Development Capabilities

Relying on the advantages of operator numbers, SIM cards and message portals, 5G messages can integrate multiple types of communication needs, such as "people-to-people, people-to-service, people-to-things, and things-to-services", and connect the "people-centered" C-end, B-end, and T-end multi-terminal forms. Operators will build the 5G message platform into an intelligent information service infrastructure, build a core "capability middle platform" for 5G messages, improve service quality, and promote the development of 5G messages in an Internet way, doing subtraction forward and multiplication backward. Through the dual "magnifying glass effect" of "capability amplification" and "value amplification", it will lead the new field of "human-computer interaction" and maximize the commercial realization ability of 5G messages.

Capability amplification: Combine the existing platform's message processing capabilities such as text, pictures, audio and video, and cards with network capabilities such as AI, IoT, large models, and edge computing. At the same time, introduce third-party capabilities such as payment, advertising, authentication, and search to provide intelligent services for the industry and users and create a more diverse message business.

Value amplification: give benefits to the C-end, provide free platform capabilities, and charge for value-added capabilities. At the same time, carry out backward cooperation such as profit sharing, advertising, commission, ranking, and bidding to achieve value transfer and multi-level monetization.

5G messages have the advantages of terminal native, unified number system, real-name authentication access, secure and reliable communications, and global interoperability. Only by combining big data, artificial intelligence, payment and other technologies to provide users with rich media and interactive chat experience can we support a standard, open and win-win 5G message ecosystem from the platform side, while providing convenient services to users and promoting industry scale and revenue growth.

Fusion Innovation

In addition to the "channel" value, 5G messages also have broader platform value, entry value, and transaction value, which still need to be further explored by the industry chain. In the future, the integration of 5G messages with the Internet of Things, XR, health management, finance, entertainment and other industries will produce more innovative applications.

By the end of 2022, the number of connected IoT devices in China has reached 1.845 billion, surpassing the number of mobile phone users for the first time; and the number of connected IoT devices worldwide has exceeded 14.4 billion, and will continue to grow in the future. 5G messaging occupies a natural entrance on mobile phones, and has achieved connections between "people and people" and "people and applications". In the future, it can also break through the boundaries with the Internet of Things, quickly realize the integration of the "application-people-things" ecosystem, and create a larger market space.

XR (extended reality) refers to technologies such as VR (virtual reality), AR (augmented reality), and MR (mixed reality). It is the main trend of the future development of the big video ecosystem, and its ecological scope covers education, entertainment, medical care, engineering and other fields. XR applications can use the user entrance and channel of 5G messages to directly reach users.

As the main force in the construction of new infrastructure, operators have high-quality networks, computing power, and cloud service capabilities, as well as natural industrial chain advantages. An important part of their new information service system is to rely on the "5G+AI" technology advantages to provide AI service capabilities to downstream users and help the digital transformation of thousands of industries. In terms of mobile networks, domestic operators have built high-performance, high-reliability 4G and 5G networks covering the whole country, and continue to evolve to 5G-A and 6G to meet the connection and computing network needs of future AI applications.

5G and 6G communications will provide users with a fully immersive interactive experience, meeting human interaction needs at the multi-sensory, emotional and conscious levels. ChatGPT is a typical representative of the development of a new generation of AI technology, and will surely be combined with communications services to provide users with highly intelligent, multi-interactive, three-dimensional and diversified communications. ChatGPT can strengthen and enable new communication applications such as 5G messages and 5G new calls, greatly improving the information interaction capabilities, industry application capabilities and productivity of communications.

At the same time, the superposition of different technologies and the integration of industries will build a new ecology. For example, smart health is the result of the superposition of 5G, Internet of Things, big video, artificial intelligence and other technologies in the field of medical health. According to the characteristics of the user group, it can be divided into health service industries such as diagnosis, medical treatment, rehabilitation, and elderly care. Data shows that in 2020, the scale of the smart health and elderly care industry alone has exceeded 4 trillion yuan, with a compound growth rate of more than 18% in the previous three years. Under the situation of intensified global aging and tight medical resources, the industry will continue to maintain rapid growth. 5G messages will be widely used in the above fields and play a role.

According to the forecast of Guotai Junan Securities Research Institute, 5G messages will further strengthen the integration with new ICT technologies. In the next 10 years, the 5G message industry is expected to evolve to a trillion yuan scale.

Conclusion

In the future, China Unicom will work with outstanding partners in the industry to use 5G messaging services as a starting point, aim to accelerate the dual leap in scale and value of "5G+Industrial Internet", and continuously enrich and improve the core capability matrix covering the five major systems of digital government, and contribute more and better "Unicom solutions" to the modernization of the national governance system and governance capabilities.