In the spring and autumn period, the years do not live, and it is the end of the year. Looking back, the ICT industry has taken a solid step through 2021.
At the end of the year and the beginning of the year, communications world all-media special inventory column, combing the development profile of key technologies, operators and head enterprises in the ICT industry this year, analyzing innovative applications, interpreting 5G landing application cases, and focusing on elites who have a profound impact on the development of the industry...
Warm old and new, 2021, come to the plate!
Spring to winter, 2021 is also coming to an end. In this year, with the strong support of policies and the concerted efforts of all parties in the industry, the industrial Internet network, as a key infrastructure for the comprehensive interconnection of people, machines and things in the industrial environment, has developed in full swing, laying a solid foundation for the digital transformation of the industrial Internet.
At present, the industrial Internet network has entered a new stage of application practice promotion from concept exploration, providing an important network connection foundation for the development of the industrial Internet. In January 2021, the Industrial Internet Innovation and Development Action Plan (2021-2023) was released, proposing a strong foundation action for the network system and further improving the new infrastructure. The construction of the industrial Internet network system has accelerated, and basic telecommunications enterprises have used 5G, NFV, SDN, slicing and other technologies to actively build a high-quality extranet with low latency, high reliability and wide coverage for industrial enterprises, which has been extended to more than 300 cities across the country and connected to 180,000 industrial enterprises.
Overall, in 2021, the industrial Internet network shows a good trend of strategic leadership, technological innovation, and comprehensive development of industrial promotion.
5G
Continue to empower the integration of industrial Internet technology
In 2021, China's 5G network construction has advanced by leaps and bounds, driving on the "highway" of rapid development. As of November 2021, China has built more than 1.39 million 5G base stations, accounting for more than 70% of the world, and is the world's largest and most technologically advanced 5G independent networking network; all prefecture-level cities and urban areas in the country, more than 97% of county towns and urban areas and 40% of townships and towns have achieved 5G network coverage; 5G end users have reached 497 million households, accounting for more than 80% of the world. Not only that, but the construction of 5G networks will continue to advance at a high speed. In the "14th Five-Year Plan for the Development of the Information and Communication Industry" issued by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology in November, the main indicators for the development of the information and communication industry in the "14th Five-Year Plan" period were also formulated, requiring that by 2025, the number of 5G base stations in China will reach more than 3.6 million.
However, compared with the field of 5G network services facing the public, many people believe that the greatest value of 5G is not in the consumer field, but in the industrial field that is not too popular with the public. As we all know, 5G networks have greater bandwidth, wider coverage, faster speed, lower latency, more reliable connections and other characteristics, and these characteristics and the network required by the industrial Internet can perfectly echo, 5G has become the best choice to support the industrial Internet wireless network.
Yang Peng, deputy general manager of the Industrial Energy Industry Development Department of China Mobile's Government and Enterprise Division, believes that the industrial Internet is the main battlefield of 5G, and 5G will further help the integration of industrial Internet technology. First of all, in the process of digital upgrading of the manufacturing industry, 5G can meet the booming transmission needs of industrial big data. Secondly, under the trend of flexible production, 5G can meet the flexible networking needs of industrial field networks.
At present, the development of China's 5G + industrial Internet has gradually stepped onto the right track. In July this year, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology organized the implementation of the "double gigabit" network coordinated development action and the 5G application "sail" action, promoted the coordinated development of 5G and gigabit optical networks, and accelerated the expansion of the industrial Internet and 5G in the key industries of the national economy. In November this year, the Industrial Internet Industry Alliance released the "Evaluation Report on the Effectiveness of China's Industrial Internet Development" at the "2021 China 5G+ Industrial Internet Conference", announcing that the number of 5G+ industrial Internet projects in China has exceeded 1800. On November 22, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology released the second batch of "5G + Industrial Internet" typical application scenarios and key industry practices, covering five major industries such as electronic equipment production, equipment manufacturing, iron and steel, mining, and electric power.
However, in the process of 5G networks continuing to empower the Industrial Internet, there are still some difficulties that need to be overcome urgently. Yu Xiaohui, president of the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology and chairman of the Industrial Internet Industry Alliance, believes that there are two outstanding problems that need to be solved in the industrial Internet 5G network: First, to solve the problem of high price of 5G industrial chip modules, the price of 5G modules is now more than 10 times the price of 4G modules, and the industrial bottleneck encountered in the development of "5G + Industrial Internet" should be eliminated in the future. The second is to solve the problem of lack of 5G terminals and continuously enrich 5G general terminals and industry terminals.
IPv6
Network construction continues to improve
IPv6 is a next-generation IP protocol designed by the Internet Engineering Task Force to replace IPv4, providing massive address resources. When the IPv4 address reserve pool is exhausted, as an important enabling technology of the Internet of Everything, it is an important direction for the future development of the network. At the same time, as an important innovation platform for the next generation of the Internet, IPv6 will provide solid support for the integration and innovative development of new technologies such as industrial Internet and 5G, Internet of Things, cloud computing, big data, and artificial intelligence.
In 2021, under the accelerated promotion and deployment of China's policies, IPv6 has achieved remarkable results, comprehensively building IPv6 "highways" and allowing more "cars" to run on this "highway". On July 8, 2021, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and the Office of the Central Cyber Security and Informatization Commission jointly issued the "Three-Year Special Action Plan for IPv6 Traffic Improvement (2021-2023)", which clarified the key development tasks for the next three years around the overall goal of IPv6 traffic improvement, marking that China's IPv6 development has officially entered the era of "traffic improvement" after passing the key stages of network readiness and end-to-end penetration. On July 23, 2021, the Cyberspace Administration of China, the National Development and Reform Commission, and the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology once again issued the Notice on Accelerating the Large-scale Deployment and Application of the Sixth Edition of the Internet Protocol (IPv6), which clarified the key directions for promoting the large-scale deployment and application of IPv6 in the next five years. On November 11, 2021, the Central Cyberspace Administration of China and other departments jointly issued the "Notice on Carrying out IPv6 Technology Innovation and Integration Application Pilot Work", proposing 9 pilot contents, of which the IPv6 upgrade of the industrial Internet network is also one of the pilot contents.
According to the data, as of August 2021, the number of active IPv6 users in China reached 551 million, accounting for 54.52% of all Internet users in China; the total traffic of LTE core network IPv6 reached 12.81Tbit/s, an increase of 28.37% over the previous month, accounting for 19.67% of LTE's total network traffic; mobile network IPv6 traffic accounted for 19.67%, fixed network IPv6 traffic accounted for 4.7%, and government website IPv6 support rate reached 81.79%. The IPv6 support rate of major commercial websites and mobile Internet applications has reached 63%, the growth rate of IPv6 traffic has accelerated significantly, and the application results have become increasingly obvious.
Coincidentally, operators are also accelerating the improvement of IPv6 network construction. China Telecom Network fully provides high-quality IPv4/IPv6 dual-stack services, mobile networks and fixed networks are fully supported and provide IPv6 services, except for 2G/3G old terminals, the rest of the mobile terminals all support IPv6; China Mobile's network-wide IPv6 active connections have reached 866.8 million, of which the mobile network is 730.4 million, Fixed network is 136.4 million, China Mobile's self-operated websites and applications have completed all IPv6 transformation, of which the IPv6 concentration of the second- and third-level links of the self-operated website (excluded chains has been excluded) has reached 100%, and the IPv6 concentration of the self-operated application cannot be excluded from the influence of external links; China Unicom currently has a new network that fully supports IPv6, fixed broadband networks, 4G networks, IDC, and the Internet of Things have all completed the upgrade and transformation, and the main websites and APP fully support IPv6. All new terminals are enabled by default for IPv6.
At present, the remarkable results achieved by IPv6 in China are obvious to all, but there are still many difficult points to be broken. Tian Hui, director of the Internet Center of the Institute of Technology and Standards of the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology and Communications Technology and deputy secretary-general of the Expert Committee for Promoting IPv6 Scale Deployment, said that from the current point of view, the main difficulties and blockages in the development of IPv6 are at both ends. One end is the terminal, and the other end is the application. On average, the IPv6 support rate in application traffic is at the level of 30%, and the next step is the rapid transformation and full transformation of existing large-scale Internet applications.
PON2.0&TSN
Rapid development helps the industrial Internet
In addition to 5G and IPv6, common industrial Internet networks include industrial PON2.0, TSN and so on.
Industrial PON2.0 network technology adopts advanced passive optical fiber communication technology to meet the network requirements of industrial enterprises such as multi-service differentiated bearer, industrial data acquisition capability, general edge computing capability, and high network reliability. In December 2021, Foshan Telecom, together with Huawei and Qishuai Digital, launched an industrial PON solution that uses an all-fiber P2MP (point-to-multipoint) two-layer minimalist architecture to create the first all-optical factory in the Greater Bay Area. Although some applications have been made, the current business maturity of industrial PON networks is not mature enough, mainly reflected in the three aspects of generally high equipment prices, insufficient types of equipment, and insufficient generalization of industrial PON networks and equipment management and maintenance. Since the industrial PON network does appear relatively late, it also needs the continuous efforts of all parties in the industrial chain to gradually be recognized and accepted in the market.
TSN is a high-quality real-time Ethernet network with bounded transmission delay, low transmission jitter and very low data loss rate, which is very suitable for industrial manufacturing automation and intelligent scenarios. According to the "Industrial Internet Network Connectivity White Paper", the IEEE TSN Working Group has made a number of major improvements in the TSN control surface protocol in the past two years at the standard level. The IEEE Std 802.1Qcp-2018 standard provides a Yang Model baseline for TSN bridge devices and adds management configuration capabilities for gating queues, frame preemption, and stream filtering in subsequent project P802.1Qcw. At the TSN Technology Integration Innovation Application Summit held in December 2021, Liu Yunjie, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, pointed out that the current Internet has turned to the second half and entered the real economy, and the demand for network certainty capabilities is becoming increasingly prominent, and TSN, as the core technology of deterministic networks, has a wide range of applications and will play an important role. In the future, all parties involved in industry, education and research should work together to make joint efforts, bravely climb the peak, make new breakthroughs, and promote technological innovation and research and development to a higher level.
Edge computing
Ushered in a stage of rapid development
The application requirements of 5G in the industry mainly focus on the connectivity and edge computing capabilities of the network. As application scenarios move toward fragmentation and diversification, and the massive growth of network data, the load on the network edge gradually increases. As a distributed computing power, edge computing delegates data processing and application operation from the network center to the edge node, which can greatly reduce the service delivery level, reduce the burden on the core network and the transmission network, reduce the occupation of bandwidth resources, and make the edge data more secure.
At present, for the broad 5G application market blue ocean and edge computing market development space, major manufacturers have actively exerted efforts. In the first half of 2021, the size of China's vertical industry and telecom network (MEC) edge computing server segment reached $200 million, an increase of 84.6% year-on-year.
From the perspective of the application industry, the demand for utilities, finance, telecommunications and manufacturing is growing rapidly, and the telecom industry actively develops edge computing platforms to carry network transformation services, including network function virtualization infrastructure NVFI, sinking core network element UPF, and multi-access edge computing MEC services. Power, finance, and manufacturing industries accelerate the deployment of edge computing servers to support scenario solutions such as industrial machine vision quality inspection, predictive maintenance of equipment, line/pipeline inspection, and smart business halls, and fully empower enterprise business innovation with edge insights.
Overall, in 2021, the development of China's industrial Internet network is booming, and traditional network technology and emerging network technology have made great progress. The industrial Internet network and the edge/cloud capability jointly build the infrastructure layer, providing large bandwidth, low latency, high reliability network entrance and high-speed pipeline, meeting the network connection needs of various new infrastructure fields, supporting rich industry digital applications, and accelerating the development of traditional industries in the direction of networking, digitization and intelligence.
It is believed that in the upcoming 2022, the development of the industrial Internet network will continue to march forward and pave a fertile soil for the development of the industrial Internet.
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Author: Yin Shuyang Liu Yanling
Editor-in-Charge/Layout: Fan Fan
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