Four major trends in China's Internet development

On April 20, 1994, China gained full access to the Internet through a 64K international dedicated line, marking the starting point of China's Internet era.

Now, 24 years later, the Internet has already sneaked into the night like the wind, moistening everything silently. In the future, the Internet will further moisten our work, life, entertainment, and even enter our capillaries.

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As an Internet industry practitioner, witness, observer, and researcher, the development trend of the Internet is my key research direction. A week ago, the Xinhua News Agency Outlook Think Tank released six major trends in China's Internet predicted by artificial intelligence based on the relevant remarks of 300 industry leaders. Disruptive technological innovation has spawned more new formats, cybersecurity and network development have been given equal weight, from the consumer Internet era to the industrial Internet era, new cultural creation, smart numbers, and the strong promotion of 5G commercialization to promote the transformation of the Internet of Things have become the most important issues that should be paid attention to in the new era.

Among them, there are four major trends that are highly consistent with my recent research direction. Let me share my interpretations:

The commercial use of 5G will greatly promote technological and ecological revolution

From telegraphs, telephones to mobile phones, and from 1G to 4G, communication technology has brought endless convenience and welfare to mankind and society. Now we are ushering in the 5G era, but what exactly is 5G?

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Is 5G just faster? Of course not. In summary, 5G has four important features: high speed, ubiquitous network, low power consumption, and low latency.

I once told a joke in the program "Three Bright Points": In the 2G era, what we watched was Sora Aoi.txt; in the 3G era, it was Sora Aoi.jpg; in the 4G era, it was Sora Aoi.avi; in the 5G era, what we see is Sora Aoi.

VR was once very popular, but why is it not popular? Because the experience of using VR now is very slow, the effect is very poor, and you will feel dizzy after watching it for a while. Because VR requires a speed of at least 157M, and the current 4G speed cannot reach that.

Once we have 5G, we can use VR very well, and then you will be able to see a real Sora Aoi.

It is easy for everyone to understand that the speed is fast. Now let’s talk about the second feature. What is ubiquitous network?

Ubiquitous Internet means that the Internet exists in every corner of social life. You may wonder, do we really need this? The answer is yes.

For example, underground garages are needed. A smart car runs outside all day and needs to be charged at night. It has to park in the parking space in the underground garage and plug in the charger. If there is no network, how can it find its parking space and plug in the charger?

For example, most bathrooms are network blind spots. In the past, we thought that if the network in the bathroom was not good, it was not good. We would not die if we did not solve it. It was nothing more than watching a video in the bathroom not fast enough. But in the 5G era, the bathroom must have a very good network. Why? The reason is simple. Your toilet must be connected to the Internet.

What should the toilet of the future look like? When you go to the bathroom, it first identifies whether you are a man or a woman, which determines whether to open the toilet lid, one lid or two lids.

The most important thing is not this. After you go to the toilet, you will be given a routine urine test with 13 indicators. After the test, it is found that your uric acid pH value has been rising recently. Uric acid is too high and is about to reach the critical point. You are about to get gout. What should you do? The toilet will remind you not to drink beer or eat seafood, and recommend a health product to inhibit gout. If you find that there is a little blood in your urine recently, your kidneys may not be very good, and it will remind you what to pay attention to.

This is very important. Many diseases are fine if they are detected early, but they will become serious problems if they are detected late. Why can't they be detected early? Because you can't check your urine carefully after you urinate. It's useless to check it yourself because you don't know the content of its components. But if you do a urine routine test once a day, all the problems will be solved.

Next, let’s talk about low power consumption.

We all wear smart watches, but it is painful to wear smart watches now because they have to be charged every day. We definitely hope that they can be charged once a month. How can we do that? We must achieve low power consumption.

For example, a belt should be connected to the Internet, and it can record my waist circumference, my physical activity, whether I have gained or lost weight recently. My glasses should also be connected to the Internet, and they can record my tear glands and many things I see. If all these things are smart and connected to the Internet, it will be troublesome: every day when I go home, I have to take off my belt to charge it, take off my leather shoes to charge it, and take off my glasses to charge it, then we don’t want to use them at all.

Therefore, the power consumption must be reduced, and the battery should be charged no more than once a month.

***Let’s talk about low latency. Low latency is the most important feature of 5G.

One thing that shocked the world this year was that an Uber self-driving car in the United States hit and killed a pedestrian. This was caused by the failure to achieve low latency.

The whole braking process is like this: First, the radar sends a signal to the pedestrian, who reflects the signal back. After receiving the signal, the driverless car converts it into an electrical signal, which is stored in the central processing system. After storage, the signal is taken out for calculation. After the calculation, it is concluded that the brake should be applied, and then the signal is transmitted to the braking system...

Solving latency is the most core issue in communication systems.

In short, 5G is a revolution. It is driven by technology and extends from the connection between people to the Internet of Everything, from individuals and families to all areas of society, thus bringing revolutionary impacts to social economy and life.

Some people say that 4G is enough. IBM's Watson once said that the world only needs 5 computers. Bill Gates also said that 640K of memory is enough. As for the technological and ecological revolution of 5G, it is obviously not a question of "is it enough?", but a question of "can we innovate more?"

New Cultural Creation——Internet culture should also pay attention to cultural values

History tells us that in any kind of social change, what can ultimately soothe people's hearts and bring care, warmth and a sense of belonging to mankind is culture.

Many technology giants are also aware of this, so they have started the layout of technology + culture early on. As a result, new cultural creation came into being!

"New Cultural Creation" refers to the cultural production mode of the new era, and its goal is to "create cultural symbols of the new era". It is a strategic concept proposed by Tencent Group in the spring of 2018. Its brief description is: with IP construction as the core, cultural value and industrial value are unified. It represents the core trend of the current development of Internet culture and the change of industrial development model.

Recently, Tencent released three mobile games that made people's eyes shine and teachers of Chinese and physics tremble. These three mobile games are "Zi Yu Shi Yun", "Namu", and "How Electricity is Formed".

"Zi Yue Shi Yun" is an independent puzzle game about Chinese characters and poetry. The game uses characters as shapes and poems as lines to give new charm to ancient poems. For example, the theme of "mountain, water, autumn, moon, and wood" that Chinese teachers love the most is used as the theme, and the puzzle is solved through the reconstruction of Chinese characters and the connection of poems. Each level is a scrambled poem, and players need to restore each poem through operations such as dragging and spelling.

Namu is about the life of plants. How do plants convert carbon dioxide into food? How do flowers become fruits? Namu uses a 3D simulation system and concise scientific explanations to help children understand the principles while playing and experimenting.

In the game "How Electricity is Generated", children are provided with many devices and laboratories that can produce electricity. These devices and laboratories are built using the principles of chemistry, physics, solar energy, etc. Children can freely create electricity by doing it themselves and experiment freely, and understand the principles of electricity unconsciously.

Functional games like these can provide more social value besides entertainment value and industrial value.

This trend of emphasizing cultural values ​​and new cultural production methods is new cultural creation.

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For enterprises, the direction of new cultural and creative industries is to achieve industrial upgrading at the existing level and obtain longer-lasting and richer economic and social benefits; at the national level, it is to further upgrade from a cultural power to a cultural powerhouse and achieve the major goal of enhancing the country's cultural soft power.

Disruptive technological innovations give rise to more new business models

According to the definition of Outlook Think Tank, disruptive technology is the technology that completely changes the past and the economic and business models it brings.

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The most recent large-scale disruptive technology is AI, which has spawned many new business models and many new unicorns, such as facial recognition, driverless cars, and so on.

The disruptive technology that is currently budding or in progress is blockchain. This may be the greatest and most far-reaching disruption we have encountered so far.

Blockchain technology is widely regarded as a value network that subverts the information Internet and a revolutionary technology that reconstructs production relations after the Internet. It will bring about a subversive revolution in many industries such as finance, the Internet of Things, social networking, e-commerce, copyright, logistics, etc. Blockchain will reshape the structure and form of traditional industries and give birth to many new industries, new formats and new models.

If the steam engine unleashed people's productivity, electricity solved people's basic living needs, and the Internet completely changed the way information is transmitted, then blockchain, as a machine for building trust, may completely change the way the entire human society transmits value.

Although blockchain technology still has various limitations and has not yet entered the homes of ordinary people, we believe that with the continuous popularization and improvement of technology, models, and policies, blockchain will surely play its due value and will gradually expand to all aspects of social life. This is the charm of blockchain.

From the consumer Internet era to the industrial Internet era

If Internet technology is integrated into larger machines and equipment in the industrial field, and software analysis technology is used to fully unleash the potential of machines, production efficiency can be better improved. This is the benefit brought by the Industrial Internet. It has emerged with the rapid development of industrial changes and network communications, and a new revolution has quietly arrived!

According to the report of the Outlook Think Tank, the consumer Internet can be explained as B2C and C2C, while the industrial Internet is B2B. This explanation can help everyone understand the consumer Internet and the industrial Internet vividly.

From a global perspective, my country's manufacturing industry is still in a weak position. Therefore, the central government has proposed the development direction and goals of "Made in China 2025". The top priority to achieve the goal is to change the development mode, carry out high-quality development, and effectively promote the improvement of total factor productivity. The industrial Internet is the new driving force for information technology to promote the innovative development of the manufacturing industry. The goal of the industrial Internet platform is to achieve intelligent manufacturing and improve total factor productivity.

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The Industrial Internet has two major connotations: network infrastructure and emerging business applications. The Industrial Internet has built an emerging network foundation. In the future, technologies such as TSN, NB-IOT, industrial Pon, multefire, 5GURLLC, 5G, NBLT, TSM, SDM, etc. will be gradually implemented to build the foundation for future industrial intelligence. In addition, the Industrial Internet constitutes emerging business formats and applications. In the future, as the platform realizes operation optimization, resource coordination and model innovation, the Industrial Internet will provide a variety of emerging business formats and applications, including intelligent production, networked collaboration, personalized customization and service extension.

The Industrial Internet is a key infrastructure that connects the entire industrial system, the entire industrial chain, and the entire value chain and supports the development of industrial intelligence. It is an emerging business model and application model formed by the deep integration of new-generation information technology and manufacturing. It is the core carrier for the Internet to expand from the consumer field to the production field and from the virtual economy to the real economy.

With the transformation and upgrading of industrial enterprise intranets and the accelerated deployment of advanced technologies such as narrowband Internet of Things (NB-IoT), a number of mature industrial Internet applications have entered the manufacturing system. The Internet has also become increasingly heavy, moving from the world of bits to the world of atoms.

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