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Recently, China Unicom Guangdong and Gree jointly completed the first commercial use of 5.5G industrial base stations in manufacturing at Zhuhai Gaolan factory.
November 18, 2024
Recently, China Unicom Guangdong and Gree jointly completed the first commercial use of 5.5G industrial base stations in manufacturing at Zhuhai Gaolan factory. The success of large-scale commercial deployment of industrial base stations marks another major breakthrough of 5.5G applications in the field of electrical appliances, which not only validates the excellent performance of 5.5G in industrial manufacturing, but also lays a solid foundation for Gree to build a world-class 5.5G converged lights out factory.
First Commercial Use of 5.5G Industrial Base Station in Manufacturing
Gree Electric Appliances, Inc. of Zhuhai is located in the Guangdong, Hong Kong and Macao Grand Bay Area, which is one of the most economically active regions in China. Under the influence of multiple factors such as technology innovation and structural optimization, Guangdong’s manufacturing industry is leading in China and globally. Gree is a well-known household appliance manufacturer in Guangdong. Currently, Gree is dedicated to building a fully automated, digital, and intelligent 5.5G converged lights out factory to make production and O&M more efficient and energy saving.
To meet the requirements of flexible production, China Unicom Guangdong provide a simplified and reliable 5.5G converged private network solution with the industrial base station. Together with the innovative hardware design and the intelligent algorithms to grade URLLC capabilities based on service requirements of different industrial equipment, the industrial base station can support concurrent access of short-latency connections in large scale. Field tests show that the interaction delay between the industrial base station enabled PLC and southbound motor and RFID gateway is below [email protected]%, which is 40% lower than that of 5G. In addition, China Unicom Guangdong cooperated with industry partners to use industrial base stations and 5G LAN technology to support L2/L3 protocols. In this way, they have managed to implemented 100% full connection in the factory where there are many complex industrial control equipment and communication protocols in operation.
The deployment of industrial base stations not only frees the industrial equipment from wired constraints, reduces the onsite maintenance workload by 33%, but also improves the collaboration efficiency of production lines and shortens the average production time by 10%. Now, Gree's maintenance team only need to stay in the control room instead of running among dozens of cabinets on site, greatly improving the efficiency and reducing the labor cost.
Gree cooperated with China Unicom Guangdong to deploy a new-generation of 5.5G industrial private network, employing technologies such as industrial base station low latency, mmWave super uplink, and Redcap low-power positioning solutions. They also worked with industry partners to build more than ten thousand intelligent connections throughout the whole factory including workshop production, quality inspection, logistics and warehousing. A data probe is embedded in each of the industrial terminal, which can be used to detect the operation status of the industrial private network, to detect sub-healthy links, accelerate fault location and avoid unexpected shutdowns. The data collected is also fed into a Digital Twin system, which are used to make the network operation more intelligent and promote more 5.5G converged applications based on AI and big data. The deployment of the 5.5G industrial private network realizes the convergence of OT and IT, greatly improves work efficiency, and helps Gree build a world-class 5.5G lights out factory in the home appliance manufacturing field.
China Unicom Guangdong and Gree have cooperated to conduct innovation in "5G + IoT" since 2019. The two parties jointly built the first 5G industrial private network with end-to-end hard slicing in 2021 and the first 5G industrial private network with 5G LAN and RedCap in 2023. These 5G innovation projects were also chosen as innovation demonstration projects by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology of China and National Development and Reform Commission of China. The first commercial use of 5.5G industrial base stations in Gree, combining 5.5G technology with Gree's production process, is another milestone in innovative cooperation between China Unicom Guangdong and Gree's IT and production departments.
The 5G industry ecosystem is fully matured through years of development from early technical research and standardization to the large-scale commercial use in the industrial field. The network performance of 5.5G are significantly improved, through emerging technologies, such as URLLC, Super Uplink, low power positioning, 5G LAN, RedCap and Passive IoT etc., which will better serve core manufacturing scenarios and enable more 5.5G converged applications in the future.
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