HUAWEI CONNECT 2017 is coming soon. Let's see how the ICT industry will drive the world in 2025 - Huawei's industry vision

Preface

Nowadays, the application of intelligent technology is changing with each passing day. From deciding what books or air tickets to buy online, to whether a job application is successful, to whether a bank loan is successfully applied for, and even choosing what treatment plan to fight a disease, people are moving towards intelligence. The rise and application of innovative ICT technologies represented by artificial intelligence are accelerating the digital transformation and upgrading of various industries, entering the "+ intelligence" era: transportation + intelligence becomes intelligent transportation, medical care + intelligence becomes intelligent medical care, and manufacturing + intelligence becomes intelligent manufacturing. The ICT industry is driving the global industries to shift from resource competition to "intelligence source" competition. A society where everything is sensed, everything is connected, and everything is intelligent is coming fast.

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HUAWEI CONNECT 2017, Huawei's annual global flagship conference for the ICT industry, will be held at the Shanghai New International Expo Center from September 5 to 7, 2017. The theme of this conference is "Grow with the Cloud", which aims to build a global sharing platform for open cooperation and discuss with customers and partners how to achieve new growth through digitalization.

As HUAWEI CONNECT 2017 is approaching, Huawei has predicted and released the Global Industry Vision (GIV). Through intuitive data and scenario-based judgments, it depicts the blueprint for how ubiquitous, efficient and intelligent connections will drive sustainable development in the "+" era of 2025.

1: Ubiquitous connectivity:

Ubiquitous connectivity will form the foundation of an intelligent society.

Huawei GIV predicts that the number of global connections will reach 100 billion in 2025, a 5.3-fold increase from 2015. Connections will become the fundamental driving force of national economies and the basic means of production for enterprises, as indispensable as electricity, driving the accelerated transformation of human society.

The number of people using the Internet will reach 6.2 billion by 2025, covering 77% of the world’s population. Connectivity will become a basic human right and a resource for survival.

Whether on the vast ocean, in the endless desert, or on an airplane ten thousand meters in the sky, connections are everywhere, promoting the free communication, sharing and exchange of ideas among humans.

Massive smart terminals will become the basic platform for human life and business.

In the future, not only will the number of personal smart terminals increase dramatically, but their forms will also become more diverse, penetrating into every aspect of life, including food, clothing, housing and transportation. The positioning of terminals will also be upgraded from being tools for humans to being assistants for humans. In 20 years, they may be implanted in the human body and develop into a human-machine integration.

Huawei GIV predicts that the number of personal smart terminals will reach 40 billion in 2025, a 4.7-fold increase from 2015; on average each person will own 5 smart terminals, and 20% of people will own more than 10 smart terminals.

Smart terminals will be integrated into all scenarios of human intelligent life. In 2025, the number of smartphones will reach 8 billion, the number of smart home terminals will reach 20 billion, the number of wearable devices will reach 8 billion, and the number of tablets and PCs will reach 3 billion. The high penetration and high utilization rate of smart terminals in 2025 will make them the most important business carrier platform, promoting a significant improvement in social and economic efficiency.

The popularization of home broadband will greatly weaken the constraints of spatial distance.

With the acceleration of global ultra-broadband construction and the application of 5G technology, Huawei GIV predicts that by 2025, broadband will be available in 75% of households worldwide (55% for fixed broadband and 20% for wireless broadband), and gigabit broadband will be available in 30% of households worldwide. Gigabit wireless broadband is expected to enter 100 million households, and humans will basically enter the ultra-broadband online era. Through a gigabit broadband network, it only takes 30 seconds to download a 4GB 1080P HD movie. In addition, high-quality gigabit broadband will also enable WiFi to seamlessly cover every room and every corner of the home, and become the basis for smart home applications such as home AI assistants and remote health management.

We believe that broadband networks will become home infrastructure like gas pipelines, SOHO offices will become an important way of working, and people's way of life and production will undergo profound changes. Even if people live on remote islands or in the mountains, they can communicate, interact and collaborate with city dwellers seamlessly through broadband networks, and create a considerable economic boost effect.

2: Efficient connection

Cloud will become an inevitable choice for enterprise digital transformation.

The investment and application of cloud computing will lower the innovation threshold of enterprises and improve their operational efficiency. In 2025, more and more enterprises will "migrate" to the cloud. Huawei GIV predicts that in 2025, most of the business processes of enterprises will be transformed by digital technology, all information technology solutions of enterprises will be cloud-based, and more than 85% of enterprise applications will be deployed on the cloud. The accelerated popularization of cloud computing also puts forward higher requirements on the bandwidth and latency of internal and external network connections of enterprises. In the future, all enterprises are actually digital enterprises.

In terms of efficiency, cloud services will significantly improve the operational efficiency of enterprises, shorten application deployment time by 90%, and accelerate innovation. In terms of benefits, the increase in IT resource utilization brought about by cloud services will promote the growth of overall social benefits. According to estimates by the simulation software CLEER, if office software, applications and operations management software are all deployed in the cloud, computing energy consumption can be reduced by 87%.

The ICT industry has become a pioneer in green environmental protection, helping to achieve green living.

If the unit energy consumption level of the ICT industry cannot be reduced, the greenhouse effect caused by the carbon emissions of the ICT industry in the next 50 years will cause tens of thousands of square kilometers of land to be submerged by seawater. Fortunately, the ICT industry is greening. On the one hand, with the development of green energy technology, the proportion of photovoltaic power generation will increase from 2% to 10%. On the other hand, with the development of energy-saving and emission-reduction technologies in the ICT industry, energy routers will realize intelligent energy scheduling and peak-shifting electricity consumption. At the same time, a large number of sites will integrate solar power generation and energy storage functions. Low-power connection equipment will also be rapidly popularized, and the average wireless base station site energy efficiency will increase from 60% to 80%.

Huawei GIV predicts that the average carbon emissions per connection in the ICT industry will drop to 15 kg in 2025, a significant decrease of about 80% from 2015. The electricity cost savings of the global ICT industry in 2025 will exceed one trillion US dollars, enough to power the residents of New York for ten years.

Per capita communication traffic will increase dramatically, and mobile video traffic will explode.

Being online anytime and anywhere is becoming a common phenomenon, high-quality digital content is emerging, and network access bandwidth will continue to increase in the future. Huawei GIV predicts that the global average daily traffic volume will reach 4GB in 2025, an increase of about 10 times compared with 2015, which is equivalent to an average of one 1080P high-definition movie watched online every day. The proportion of traffic generated on mobile terminals will also increase from 7% in 2015 to 25% in 2025. In 2025, the average daily mobile traffic volume will reach 1GB, an explosive growth of about 30 times compared with 2015.

In the ultra-broadband online era, high-quality video content such as high-definition entertainment videos, surveillance videos, social videos, VR/AR, and holographic images will be very rich and widely popular. In 2025, video will account for more than 90% of network traffic, becoming an important way of information transmission. The information flow economy will prosper rapidly with the sharp increase in communication traffic.

3: Intelligent connection:

The explosion of data provides a huge amount of basis for machine learning

As data storage costs continue to decline and the industry-wide digital transformation wave arrives, information collection devices (such as cameras) will also grow dramatically. Huawei GIV predicts that the amount of data generated and stored annually in the world will reach 180ZB (180 billion TB) in 2025, an increase of about 20 times from 2015.

If the data generated and stored in one second in 2025 is viewed by people in the form of 1080P high-definition video, it will take 140 years to watch it all. The amount of additional data will far exceed the human processing capacity. Machines will replace humans to complete most of the information processing work and provide key basis for intelligent decision-making.

Intelligent personal assistants are becoming more popular and become the gateway to online services.

Due to the serious information overload and the increasing number of application services, it will become increasingly difficult for humans to accurately obtain useful information and efficiently select personalized services. As information processing is increasingly completed through machine learning, more natural and efficient voice interaction will become the mainstream human-computer interaction method, and intelligent personal assistants will quickly become popular, helping users deal with personal life and work affairs.

Huawei GIV predicts that by 2025, 90% of smart terminal users worldwide will use intelligent personal assistants, human society will generally enter the era of artificial intelligence, and the artificial intelligence terminal market will reach hundreds of billions of dollars in 2025.

Intelligent personal assistants will connect to the cloud intelligent brain in the form of AI as a service, provide personalized services across terminals for users' work and life anytime and anywhere, and become the entrance to various online services. In the future, users can interact with the intelligent personal assistants they carry with them through voice, greatly improving the efficiency of information acquisition and the level of personalized decision-making.

The rise of intelligent service robots will gradually subvert the human lifestyle.

On the one hand, the world's population is aging, and on the other hand, AI technology and home service applications will gradually mature, and the cost of smart home robots will drop significantly. Huawei GIV predicts that by 2025, smart home robots will enter 12% of households, forming a market of hundreds of billions of dollars, and gradually changing the service model of an aging society. Some smart home robots have become the core of smart home services. They will greatly improve people's quality of life and gradually subvert human lifestyles. The smart home robot industry will gradually change all walks of life, just like the automobile industry in the last century, and gradually affect the fundamental form of the economy and society.

By 2025, the connections between industries, enterprises, and individuals will become closer, and cross-border and reconstruction will become the basic form of industrial upgrading. Ubiquitous, efficient, and intelligent connections are accelerating the digital transformation of industries and creating a better fully connected world for mankind.