China Mobile was invited to the 2021 Huawei User Group Meeting and delivered a keynote titled “Enable Industries and Build a Better World with Intelligent Connections.” The talk discussed the development of China Mobile’s IoT support system in the 5G era.
China Mobile began its IoT journey in 2002. Over 19 years of development, it has built the world’s largest dedicated IoT core network and operation support system. By the end of 2020, China Mobile had over 800 million users — penetration increasing twenty-fold between 2015 and 2020 at a compound annual growth rate above 65%.
Through its efficient, stable, and secure IoT private networks, China Mobile cooperates with nearly 1600 member enterprises on application practices in different fields, including transportation, logistics, power grid, home appliances, security protection, healthcare, industry, agriculture, and environmental protection. By the end of 2020, the ecosystem had launched over 5000 industry innovation projects.
China Mobile has been working with its strategic partner — Huawei — to explore efficient support modes for IoT services. To this end, the two companies have cooperated extensively to quickly respond to market service requirements through efficient O&M, fast roll-out, and service innovation.
Cloud native architecture capabilities for efficient O&M
The cloud native architecture and container-based deployment reduce IT resource deployment costs and improve deployment efficiency by more than 30%. Depending on the context, the system supporters are provided with flexibility to choose the public, hybrid, or private cloud for quick service deployment.
Pre-configured templates for fast roll-out in multiple service scenarios
There are more than 200 baseline service processes that are pre-configured based on best practices and usable upon unpacking. Multiple business scenarios, such as B2C and B2B, are supported without additional development. More than 300 templates are pre-set to implement agile online configurations and release of local business processes.
An open and agile business platform for service innovation
Microservice architecture, metadata driver, and layer-by-layer decoupling between services transform traditional waterfall development into local agile DevOps development. The agile and quick roll out of service versions takes weeks instead of months. Microservice capabilities are opened through standardized and open APIs, allowing third parties to quickly customize and release local service requirements.
The innovation of technical capabilities promotes the transformation of IoT services. In terms of the architecture, China Mobile has transformed traditional monolithic applications into applications on clouds and containers that target services and microservices.
In terms of the technology, China Mobile has transformed from the traditional vertical application structure to a “thick platform and thin applications” to provide common and shared middle-layer capabilities.
In terms of the service, China Mobile has shifted from connection pipes to differentiated network capabilities, and from simple services to multi-services and convergence, achieving fast service innovation and monetization.
In terms of the organization, China Mobile has moved away from traditional waterfall development to DevOps-based agile development and integrated O&M. The transformation in these four aspects has laid a solid foundation for China Mobile’s IoT service innovation and development, as well as its building of a pan-connection service support system oriented to 5G+.
In the future, IoT will evolve from tens of billions of connections to hundreds of billions of connections, gradually shifting to the smart connectivity of everything. China Mobile says it will continue to focus on its “Powerhouse” strategy, promote IoT technologies and ecosystem construction, and build an IoT ecosystem alliance.
China Mobile hopes to enable the digital transformation and intelligent development of both industries and societies, and enrich people’s life in a fully connected world.
Since the first Huawei User Group Meeting 13 years ago, an Advisory Board composed of 12 representatives from Huawei’s customer base has worked with over 440 customer volunteers to actively offer leading industry insights which formulate suggestions for Huawei’s operations.
Then, in collaboration with Huawei’s project teams, the Board participates in improvement projects to address the identified top issues. To date, more than 60 such projects have been implemented to continually improve the quality of Huawei’s products, services, and solutions, and create greater value for our customers.
