Big data industry is a new trend. What are the advantages of operators?

The big data industry is a strategic emerging industry that focuses on data generation, collection, storage, processing, analysis and services. The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology recently released the "14th Five-Year Plan for the Development of the Big Data Industry" (hereinafter referred to as the "Big Data Plan"), which puts forward the overall goals for the "14th Five-Year Plan" period and will become the foundation for the future development of the big data industry. As the main force in the new infrastructure of big data, operators not only actively provide network foundations for various industries, but also create new value for the digital economy with application capabilities.

1. The scale of big data in the 13th Five-Year Plan will exceed one trillion

Data elements are the "oil" of the digital economy era. According to Xie Shaofeng, director of the Information Technology Development Department of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, during the 13th Five-Year Plan period, China's big data industry started rapidly. It is estimated that the average annual compound growth rate of the big data industry will exceed 30%, and it will exceed 1 trillion yuan in 2020. The industry has achieved remarkable results. However, the lack of social awareness, the lack of technical support, the imperfect market system, and the imperfect security mechanism have become development constraints.

To this end, the recently released "Big Data Plan" puts forward the overall goal of the "14th Five-Year Plan" period. By 2025, the estimated scale of the big data industry will exceed 3 trillion yuan, and the average annual compound growth rate will remain at around 25%. It is required that a modern big data industry system with strong innovation, high added value, and independent controllability will be basically formed.

2. The data infrastructure system is gradually taking shape

A new trend of the big data industry is taking shape. As the most important infrastructure of the big data industry, the Big Data Plan proposes to "accelerate the construction of a national integrated big data center system, promote the construction of national industrial Internet big data centers, strengthen the coordinated intelligent scheduling of computing power, and build a number of national hub nodes and big data center clusters."

Experts say

At present, the connotation of data infrastructure is gradually extending from traditional data centers to the main life cycle of data elements, including data collection and transmission, data storage and computing, data circulation and transaction, and data innovation and application.

In my country, a relatively complete data infrastructure system is taking shape. In terms of data collection and transmission, according to the latest data from the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, my country has built more than 1.15 million 5G base stations, accounting for more than 70% of the world's total, and the Gigabit optical network has the capacity to cover more than 200 million households.

In terms of data storage and computing, 11 national new industrialization industry demonstration bases in the field of big data have been built in eight national big data comprehensive experimental zones, including Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei, Shanghai, and Guizhou, which have effectively promoted the agglomeration of the big data industry. Operators are the most important players in digital infrastructure. It is understood that 60% of my country's data centers are owned by the three major telecom operators, of which China Telecom has the highest share, followed by China Unicom and China Mobile.

On the one hand, China Telecom is accelerating the layout of data centers and Tianyi Cloud resource pools, consolidating the status of two group-level super-large-scale data centers in Inner Mongolia and Guizhou, and forming a "2+4+31+X+O" resource layout, with more than 420,000 IDC racks, more than 700 data centers and domestic leading basic network capabilities across the country; on the other hand, it is orderly promoting the construction of provincial data center resources, actively promoting the application of mature innovative technologies, and striving to promote the transformation and upgrading of old data center rack resources.

In addition to owning the largest IDC infrastructure in the country, China Telecom also provides a comprehensive package of products including computing, storage, CDN, big data, etc., providing a solid support for the information needs of governments at all levels, various industries, large, medium and small enterprises, families and individuals.

3. Operators actively promote innovation in big data applications

Operators are not only the main force in the construction of big data infrastructure, but also play a pivotal role in the big data industry. For example, at the recent opening ceremony of the Shanghai Data Exchange and the 2021 Shanghai Global Digital Business Conference, China Telecom Shanghai's "Yizhi Time and Space" big data service, as the first batch of data element products launched after the opening of the Shanghai Data Exchange, completed its first transaction with the "Shanghai State-owned Capital Operation Research Institute".

In terms of big data applications, China Telecom Xinjiang Habahe Branch will deepen and expand the livestock and veterinary big data platform in breeding parks; China Telecom's rural big data platform focuses on the pain points of resource integration in the three major areas of agriculture, rural areas and farmers, and provides a platform for rural information management, information services and information interaction for supervisors, rural business staff, farmers and the general public.

Telecom operators have a natural advantage in the big data industry. Their efforts in big data applications not only provide digital capabilities for all walks of life and create value for the digital economy, but also bring opportunities for their own development. Data on the economic operation of the communications industry from January to October released by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology show that in the first 10 months of this year, the three basic telecommunications companies actively developed emerging businesses such as Internet data centers, big data, and cloud computing, and achieved a total business revenue of 185.4 billion yuan, driving the growth of telecommunications business revenue by 3.7 percentage points. Among them, big data revenue increased by 33.1% year-on-year, and data center business revenue increased by 18.7% year-on-year.