CIIE Voice丨Dialogue with Wu Lidong, Vice President of Ericsson Northeast Asia

Moderator: Hello everyone, you are watching the voice of CBN. During this period, our guest in the studio is Ms. Wu Lidong, Vice President of Ericsson Northeast Asia, to welcome Mr. Wu.

Guest: Thank you. It's a pleasure to come to CIIE Sound.

Moderator: This year is also the sixth time that Ericsson has participated in the CIIE. So in this year's CIIE, what kind of voice does Ericsson mainly deliver?

Guest: I think the new era is an era of innovation and development. Innovation is inseparable from intelligence and digitalization. Ericsson is actually a communications technology company that takes communication as its mission. Globally, we are committed to helping countries around the world, including China, achieve a digital and sustainable future by building high-quality 5G networks around the world.

Guest: We have seen that the number of 5G subscribers worldwide has reached 1.3 billion. 260 operators around the world have launched 5G services. In China, according to the latest release of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, the number of digital base stations has reached 3.189 million. The number of such contracts for 5G mobile phones in China has reached 695 million. I think the most amazing thing for operators around the world is the number of our 5G applications. Our 5G applications have been integrated into 60 categories of the national economy, and the total number of applications has reached 50,000.

Moderator: You mentioned earlier that 260 operators around the world have launched 5G commercial services, and Ericsson has the leading share. What kind of level is this?

Guest: Ericsson provides 5G network services for 155 of the world's 260 operators.

Guest: Actually, we can also see from the figures just shared. China's 5G is at the forefront of the world in terms of the scale of construction and the number of applications. In the second half of 5G, Ericsson proposed a new wave of 5G development. We put forward this concept in the hope that it can help Chinese operators lead the next round of 5G development in four aspects: performance, energy saving, intelligence, and empowerment. If the first half is dominated by coverage and construction, we believe that the second half should pay more attention to the quality of coverage, but more attention should be paid to the quality of 5G development. So we put forward four pillars in the new wave of 5G. One is excellent performance, one is green and low-carbon, one is enabling growth, and the other is highly self-intelligent. The core and primary task of these four aspects is to realize the network value of 5G, and only in this way can it be integrated with all walks of life.

Guest: I think the core of empowerment is to empower the large-scale growth of applications. There is a bottleneck in the scale of 5G, that is, the cost of 5G terminals is too high. The 5G lightweight technology, or Redcap technology as we call it in English, can solve this problem very well. It mainly optimizes some costs of the 5G terminal by doing some subtraction to reduce some complexity of the 5G terminal in terms of bandwidth, antenna, and modulation mode. This makes 5G have a better application prospect in a wider range of applications. Ericsson hopes to help this 5G lightweight technology be commercialized in China as soon as possible. On the other hand, one of the efforts that Ericsson is doing around the world is to promote the openness of network capabilities. We hope that this unique capability of 4G or 5G can be pushed directly to the fingers of developers. And in this way, the 5G ecosystem can be greatly prospered. I'll talk about one more one, for example, in terms of performance, so we used to talk about the performance or speed of 5G, and we generally talked about peak rate. But in fact, if you want this 5G to be able to realize the value of 5G, you need to have a stable and high-speed speed. It's not just the peak rate, it's the experience rate. For example, you may have this experience, sometimes you walk on the road and you will find, why my phone has no signal, how is the network disconnected, why suddenly I can't hear the other party's voice on the phone. In fact, sometimes the reason for this is because you may have moved to an edge of our network coverage, which is usually relatively weak.

Moderator: It happens to be a dead end.

Guest: Yes, if it's a connecting place, there will usually be a breakpoint. That's why Ericsson has also introduced some corresponding technologies that can effectively reduce the hollowness of this network coverage, or the overlap of coverage between each other. In this way, users can reduce the phenomenon that I just said, so let's also do a test, that is, through such a technical improvement, so that this edge of its downlink speed can be increased by 35%. Therefore, users may not have the disconnection just mentioned or the experience is not good. So this is what we call it, which is what we care more about is the rate of experience. But what is the core? That is, the core of our entire 5G new wave is to realize the business value of 5G networks.

Moderator: Okay, the other part that mentions performance, you mentioned that everyone will mention the high performance, low latency and so on of 5G, you mentioned that the ultimate is the experience rate, but in the process of building this, we see new infrastructure. This kind of loading speed is very fast. But the other thing is green and sustainable. The Chinese government has also put forward such a dual carbon goal. Therefore, I would like to ask you, when the ICT industry needs to achieve rapid development, high performance, low energy consumption, and low latency, how will the ICT industry form a synergy between the two under the vision of carbon peaking and carbon neutrality?

Guest: In this new wave of 5G, one of them is called energy saving. So in fact, for Ericsson, green and sustainable development is the strategy for the overall development of our company. In this regard, green and low-carbon is actually a very important aspect of environmental sustainable development. So on the one hand, of course, our own operations, we have to ensure green and low-carbon. For example, all of our Ericsson factories are clean energy, and our products must be green and low-carbon. So for example, our 5G products in 2022 are equivalent to 4G products in 2017, which have reduced energy consumption by a factor of ten. Of course, we are still constantly improving the weight, size, and energy consumption of this base station through this silicon core technology, or the optimization of software and hardware, and further making efforts in this regard. In addition, we have launched a zero-carbon base station, which is also quite interesting. So it's not just a product, but the entire base station can be powered by this clean energy, thereby reducing the level of carbon emissions of the entire base station. That's one thing. On the other hand, in fact, we also hope to drive the green and low-carbon development of our entire industrial chain. Therefore, we hope that by 2040, all manufacturers in the industry chain can achieve zero carbon emissions, which is also one of our visions.

The ICT industry as a whole does not account for 1.4% of the total carbon emissions. However, we see that the digital construction we just talked about can drive the carbon emissions of the whole society to be reduced by 15%, which is an expert prediction. Therefore, we also very much hope that we can work with other partners through 5G technology, through our high technology, through our digital transformation, to drive the reduction of carbon emissions of the whole society.

Moderator: Yes, on the one hand it's a beautiful vision, but as you said, it's also a bold vision. But in any case, in the face of the current great changes unseen in a century, in the face of technological trends, the future and nature, in fact, mankind is a community with a shared future. Under this issue, there must be cooperation, and there must be cooperation. Speaking of Ericsson's 131 years in the Chinese market, it is clear that you have crossed the cycle, and you have gone through an era from 1G, 2G all the way to 5G and then to 6G. So in the future, how will Ericsson continue to promote a more pragmatic new wave of 5G to promote the development of digitalization and sustainable development in China?

Guest: For 131 years, I think Ericsson has done one thing, which is to bring our global experience and technology to China. Therefore, we also hope to rely on the concept of the new wave of 5G to continue to help Chinese operators continue to lead in the second half of 5G development. It can support the digital development of China and the world. and a sustainable future.