PRESS RELEASE: China Mobile Hubei and Huawei recently held their first 5G fully-connected factory ecosystem salon. With the theme of “working together for a new future of smart manufacturing”, the salon shared how Midea successfully built a 5G fully-connected washing machine factory in Jingzhou, a City in China. This event gathered nearly 100 industry partners onsite to discuss the development of the 5GtoB ecosystem while accelerating its replication at scale.

The salon’s goal of building a 5G ecosystem is in line with the 5G Fully-connected Factory Construction Guide released by China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) and China Mobile’s special actions on 5G fully-connected factories. Such an ecosystem would enhance industry consensus and pool innovation towards an intelligent future. The salon saw active participation of owners, operators, equipment vendors, terminal vendors, and application partners across the entire ecosystem, analyzing the full processes and all-scenario applications exemplified by the Midea’s factory.

At the event, the participants marveled at how core production processes applied 5G while sharing success stories using 5G+Intelligence machine vision, 5G+warehousing and logistics, and 5G industry terminals. They also discussed 5G indoor positioning, RedCap and passive IoT applications. Huawei’s commercial 5G indoor positioning is precise to 1 m@90% as commercially verified for forklift and personnel positioning on factory and metro 5G networks. As low-power high-accuracy positioning (LPHAP) chipsets commercialize this year, 5G indoor positioning will be the first to be deployed at scale in 5G fully-connected factories. With multi-purpose 5G networks tailored to fully-connected factories, the increasingly robust E2E ecosystem promotes a manufacturing industry that is high-quality, cost-effective, green, and secure.

Ecosystem partners visit Midea’s 5G fully-connected factory in Jingzhou

Midea’s washing machine factory in Jingzhou is the world’s first 5G fully-connected factory in the home appliance manufacturing sector. 5G connections have been applied across 15 scenarios and nine production processes are seamlessly connected through 2,500 5G devices, making it a 5G smart factory with the largest number of 5G devices used and the most comprehensive use of 5G for production. Once its second-phase construction is complete, 5G terminals will exceed 8,000 in number. Midea Jingzhou has applied 5G in all scenarios and processes for the first time. This application improves production efficiency by 17%, doubles direct delivery rate, and saves on stocking and single-machine labor costs by 50% and 30%, respectively.

China Mobile has worked with Huawei to implement a list of unique technologies for efficient operation of the Midea factory. Huawei’s pioneering high-precision 3D modeling and simulation use laser point clouds to plan the factory environment, as well as device traffic and distribution with a modeling precision of 99% and simulation accuracy of over 90%. 5G Distributed Massive MIMO technology provides a deterministic uplink rate of over 1 Gbps per 1,000 m2 for Intelligence-based quality inspection, improving defect detection rate by 10%. The factory also uses the world’s first indoor distributed micro base station with internal adjustable beams, improving its uplink capacity by 10%.

Midea’s experience has been encapsulated in the 5G Network Construction and Application Guidelines for the Home Appliance Industry in Hubei Province, providing standardized solutions for promotion and replication across the industry.

Publication of the 5G Network Construction and Application Guidelines for the Home Appliance Industry in Hubei Province

Looking ahead to 2025, the MIIT will strive to promote 5G fully-connected factories for ten thousands of enterprises. China Mobile Hubei will continue to work with Huawei and ecosystem partners to strengthen 5G innovation, empower the in-depth integration of new technologies and manufacturing services, and help industry customers achieve full digitalization and intelligence while advancing new industrialization.