New technologies are driving the fourth industrial revolution and transforming the manufacturing sector around the world.
Manufacturers are working to leverage digital solutions like internet of things (IoT) technologies, robotics, data analytics, artificial intelligence (AI) and augmented and virtual reality to transform their business models. They are also deploying voice and video data solutions to ensure their back-office teams can collaborate with customers, suppliers and partners.
Interconnected networks are central to Industry 4.0 digital solutions. Ensuring that these cross-border networks deliver the optimal speed, security, reliability and bandwidth for the digital transformation of the manufacturing industry is an ongoing challenge — especially since production and distribution operations tend to be widespread across borders and around the world. Seeking a trusted global technology partner is a top priority.
CMI builds smart industrial park solutions for manufacturers, providing digital infrastructure for industrial parks and next-generation internet solutions. Leveraging its world-class network infrastructure, it offers secure and reliable network solutions to help factories build highly reliable and evolvable production networks and quickly establish secure cross-border interconnections at global scale.
Digital Infrastructure for Industrial Parks
A high-speed, interconnected, smart, sustainable and reliable digital infrastructure is ubiquitously required for the digital transformation of traditional manufacturing parks. The digital infrastructure has been expanded into a system integrating perception, transmission, storage, computing power and processing capability with the aim of developing a new-generation telecommunication facility such as “Dual Gigabit” network, data and computing power in data centers, as well as industrial Internet. All of these primarily evolved from the traditional telecommunication network centering on information transmission.
CMI has an outstanding client portfolio and experience in building manufacturing networks, with which the company is committed to choosing the most appropriate telecommunication technology according to clients’ budgets and application scenarios. It is to best satisfy the requirements for production management and industrial application by deploying a network combining industrial wired and wireless communications at various production sites.
Since there are multiple operating areas and networked devices around the factory, CMI has built a mature operation and maintenance management platform, providing clients with multi-dimensional services for full automation in operational management.
New-Generation Networking Solutions for Manufacturers – SD-WAN
The traditional enterprise wide-area network (WAN) is a private network that enhances the interconnection between nodes at all levels across regions, including headquarters, data centers, branches and mobile offices, all through leased operator links or self-built links. In recent years, with the continuous evolution of enterprise digital transformation and economic globalization, the enterprise WAN has faced a series of new challenges in networking, application experience assurance and security. SD-WAN hence emerges under the new circumstances to apply SDN to WAN in order to achieve cloud networking for enterprises.
CMI's SD-WAN solution provides enterprise clients with an easy-to-manage, highly available and flexible WAN through a cloud management platform, enabling clients to swiftly build global networks. With CMI’s global backbone transmission network, it can flexibly utilize various access methods like bandwidth, Internet and LTE/5G to connect SD-WAN gateway with the Customer Premise Equipment (CPE) of the enterprise.
One of our clients operates globally and is the world’s leading manufacturer of high-precision, high-complexity and functional castings and machine components. The client would like to deploy some services to the cloud that require connections with private VPC. The initial plan was to deploy MPLS’s solution of an operator at a higher cost, but the client would like a more flexible and cost-effective network solution.
With SD-WAN as the starting point, CMI adopted MPLS and SD-WAN in major nodes and sub-nodes respectively, providing a high-quality SD-WAN networking solution with simpler deployment, faster delivery and at a lower price. By integrating SD-WAN, MPLS, IEPL and cloud connections, CMI managed to help the client reduce its networking costs by 30% and provided a quality Internet experience with a simpler solution deployment and shorter delivery cycle.
CMI is on the cusp of a new era of digitization, networking and intelligence for the manufacturing industry. CMI will combine first-class telecommunications networks and cutting-edge technologies to help manufacturers take advantage of Industry 4.0 solutions to drive productivity and efficiency.
Prosperous Future of Smart Manufacturing
Equipped with the world’s most comprehensive 5G network, China Mobile creates the “1+1+1+N” product system for 5G industrial Internet, further driving the deep integration of 5G+ industrial Internet and flexibly combining the demands of different clients. CMI also has the most diversified 5G client cases worldwide, which is beneficial for the construction of 5G industrial Internet with network mobility, terminal-cloud integration and stability to accelerate the digital transformation of the industry.
Emerging technologies such as 5G are accelerating the transformation of manufacturing companies. China Mobile has been working with manufacturing companies in Zhejiang Province to conduct a pilot project of the Intelligent and Simple 5G Industry Network, with a base station integrating cloud, networks and business requirements under multiple industrial manufacturing parameters. This scenario contained typical AGVs, electronic fences for safe production, data acquisition in factories and machine vision systems for product inspection. In the future, 5G networks will offer manufacturers and telecom operators the chance to build smart factories and take advantage of technologies such as automation, IoT and artificial intelligence to further shape and transform the manufacturing industry.