PRESS RELEASE: China Unicom and Huawei jointly held an online release conference on technology innovation and practice achievements under the theme of “Take on Responsibilities for Technology Independence”. With the attendance of industry partners, the two shared the results of their innovations in 5G evolution and officially initiated the technology innovation industry collaboration plan.

During the conference, Mai Yanzhou, Senior Vice President of China Unicom, said that China Unicom will focus on “big connectivity, big computing, big data, big applications, and big security” under its new digital-economy-centered strategy, to upgrade the drivers, paths, and modes of growth. It will innovate in areas such as network information security, ‘Three Gigabit’, Computing Power Network, Intelligence Brain, and 5G applications and collaboratively work on “network technology standards”, “core technology breakthroughs”, “industry application innovation”, and “industry ecosystem alliance” with industry partners. Together, they will explore a new development space for the digital economy.

Wang Zhiqin, Vice President of the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology (CAICT), delivered a speech titled “5G Evolution Facilitates Digital Innovation and Digital Transformation”. She analyzed the trend of continuous enhancement of 5G standard capabilities and service refining, and proposed to define a roadmap for 5G evolution based on industry application demands to accelerate the development of 5G.

Ma Hongbing, the General Manager of China Unicom’s Science & Technology Innovation Department, shared the achievements of their three ‘smart’ innovations in 5G evolution and their focus and goals for the future.

  • Smart new vision: Through service awareness and differentiated assurance technologies, a user-perceived rate of 500 Mbps and a latency of 20 ms have been achieved. Next, China Unicom will focus on technology innovation to achieve a downlink speed of 10 Gbps to meet the future ultimate experience requirements of all-sense interaction and virtual-reality integration.
  • Smart high uplink: Through virtual high bandwidth and overhead combination, the user-perceived uplink rate is increased by more than 50%. With the future sharp growth of uplink traffic in mind, China Unicom will work to achieve an uplink speed of at least 1 Gbps through technology innovation to realize intelligent connection of everything.
  • Smart super sensing: This innovation makes full use of the MIMO and high bandwidth enabled by 5G to achieve a sensing precision of about 10 m and a latency of 4 ms with a reliability of 99.999% for URLLC. The next step is to innovate in integrated sensing and communications to further increase the sensing precision, while improving URLLC latency and reliability through innovation practices in intelligent manufacturing to enable core industrial production processes.

Gan Bin, Vice President of Huawei Wireless Solution, shared Huawei and China Unicom’s joint achievements in smart new vision, smart high uplink, and smart super sensing in the past year. “We have made new technological breakthroughs. We promoted the initiation of study items such as frame integrity scheduling and integrated sensing and communications within 3GPP. We have also developed applications for low-altitude drone management, flexible intelligent manufacturing, and smart power grid with industry partners, leading the development of the 5.5G industry. On this basis, commercializing 5.5G by 2025 requires continuous technology innovation in ultra-high bandwidth, uplink spectrum reconstruction, ELAA-MM, green air interfaces, and native intelligence. These technologies will be essential for us to build ‘1+1+N’ networks that can ensure ubiquitous 10 Gbps and 100 billion-level connectivity.”

Miao Shouye, Director of China Unicom’s 5G Co-construction and Sharing Working Group, shared innovation practices and thoughts on new 5G network technologies in six aspects: high-speed and ubiquitous, aerial-ground in one, cloud-network integrated, intelligent and agile, green and low-carbon, and secure and controllable. Yin Shaochun, Deputy General Manager of China Unicom’s Marketing Department, shared the progress made in practicing innovative applications such as 5G new calling, 5G messaging, 5G + HD livestreaming, and video RBT by utilizing China Unicom’s 5G networks. Fan Ji’an, Chief Big Data Scientist at China Unicom, shared the innovative application cases that drive intelligent development of industrial digital systems with 5G high bandwidth and low latency. Li Hongwu, President of China Unicom Research Institute, released China Unicom’s technology innovation industry action plan and initiated the technology innovation industry collaboration plan with partners. Wei Jinwu, Vice President of China Unicom Research Institute, released China Unicom’s white papers on 5G-Advanced URLLC and integrated sensing and communications.

Zhang Yunfei, Director of Tencent Future Network Lab and Chief Scientist of Tencent Smart Transportation, and Ling Zhi, a technical expert at State Grid Zhejiang Electric Power Co., Ltd., also shared their thoughts on how 5G evolution will facilitate real-time digital twin innovation and how integrated sensing and communications will enable smart grid applications.

Following this conference, China Unicom will continue to work with industry partners to reach consensuses, promote sustainable 5G evolution, and bring digital intelligence and value to various industries.