5G will catalyze the era of large-scale innovation in the whole society

Intuitively, 5G has a very obvious role in driving the real economy. As Zhang Congwu, senior engineer of the Radio Research Center of the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology, said, unlike consumer Internet applications, the main battlefield of 5G applications is to empower the real economy. In the two years since 5G was commercialized, it has played an important role in the transformation of the real economy to digitalization, networking, and intelligence. Taking the autonomous driving industry, which is recognized by the industry as the most promising 5G application scenario, as an example, 13 ports in my country have now achieved commercial trial operation of autonomous driving container trucks. In addition, autonomous driving vehicles have also appeared in mining, trunk logistics, terminal distribution, park logistics and other fields. In the autonomous driving demonstration areas of more than 20 cities, multiple brands of autonomous driving taxis and autonomous driving buses have opened reservation services for citizens. It is undeniable that 5G has become an important driving force for a new round of technological revolution in the automotive industry and a deep transformation in the transportation industry. Similar application scenarios include smart mines, smart energy, and smart manufacturing. In the transformation and upgrading of traditional industries, 5G, like the catalytic effect of "turning stones into gold", releases huge energy once it breaks out.

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In addition to the obvious functions of autonomous driving, replacing people with machines, improving efficiency, reducing the intensity and danger of workers' work, etc., 5G has also become one of the important breakthroughs in benefiting people's livelihood and enhancing people's sense of gain. Take smart healthcare as an example. In this field where 5G integration is most widely used, with the continuous enrichment of 5G application scenarios in the medical and health industry, my country's problems such as insufficient total amount of high-quality medical resources, uneven distribution, and difficulty in cross-regional medical treatment are expected to be gradually solved, and at the same time, it has also catalyzed the rapid growth of an emerging industry. The "2020 Smart Healthcare Development Research Report" released by the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology shows that the scale of my country's smart healthcare industry has exceeded 100 billion yuan in 2020, and it is expected to reach 125.9 billion yuan in 2021. Similarly, in emerging fields such as smart education and smart cities, 5G has also promoted the coordinated growth of social and economic benefits.

Through these quantifiable and intuitive phenomena, it is not difficult to find that the leap from 4G to 5G is a qualitative leap. The advanced layout of 5G, a new generation of communication capabilities, has triggered an industrial fusion effect in China. 5G is like a new large platform. Many technologies can be built on the 5G platform. Whether it is a traditional industry or an emerging industry, once it is integrated with 5G, it will inevitably produce a new energy level transition. As Luo Qingqi, a senior expert in the industry, once predicted, if the communication era before 5G caused the space travel or compression of information, with the support of technology, China's first 5G communication will cause a new space dimension upgrade in the world. The connection density of 5G can reach 1 million per square kilometer, which can effectively support the access of massive IoT devices. Therefore, the completion of the 5G communication network means that the whole of China, including people and things, will enter the Internet era. The entire social behavior and the flow of social knowledge will be directly superimposed together. People in the society and their objects will become the creators of knowledge, and the companion relationship between society and knowledge will be fully constructed. It is no exaggeration to say that in the 5G era, 5G has become a tool for organizing the collective wisdom of society, and the activities of people and things are a decisive factor of production.

More importantly, China's economic development will be decoupled from the demographic dividend centered on low-cost labor prices, and will usher in a huge innovation dividend created by all members of society and connected objects. In other words, 5G has given China the highest knowledge innovation density in the world, and the whole society has been pushed into an era of large-scale innovation, which in a sense has become an economic upgrading tool. Data show that as of the end of June, there have been more than 10,000 5G application innovation cases nationwide, ranking first in the world in terms of both quantity and innovation. Among them, there are more than 1,500 "5G+Industrial Internet" projects, and 138 steel companies, 194 power companies, 175 mines, and 89 ports have realized the commercialization of 5G applications. In the future, my country will also focus on promoting the in-depth application of 5G in the fields of industrial Internet, Internet of Vehicles, smart logistics, smart ports, smart mining, smart electricity, smart oil and gas, smart agriculture and smart water conservancy, continue to promote the research and development and industrialization of key products and devices such as 5G chips, modules, terminals, etc., optimize the 5G ecosystem, and create a number of industry and field benchmarks through pilot demonstration applications and the construction of integrated application pilot zones, thereby accelerating the digital transformation of key industries.

Looking around the world, the current global competition around 5G is not simply a competition within the communications industry such as chips, software, and many communications equipment, but a competition around the time window for generating the next generation of social digital forms. From this perspective, my country has built the world's largest 5G independent networking network, with a total of 961,000 5G base stations opened and about 365 million 5G terminal connections. These data undoubtedly show that China's 5G development has been at the forefront of the world. However, at a time when countries are accelerating their 5G layout and even starting to compete with China in the 6G field, we must seize the time window and first-mover advantage, accelerate the penetration of 5G from auxiliary links to the core of production, accelerate the large-scale development of 5G "from 1 to N", and achieve transcendence in the new round of scientific and technological revolution and industrial transformation with innovative strength.