In the era of the Internet of Things in China, the industry has begun to grow explosively. Back in 2015, China Telecom had only 980,000 IoT connections, however, in just two years, this number has grown by 45 times, reaching 44.3 million in 2017. At the beginning of 2017, China Mobile had predicted that the number of Internet of Things connections for the whole year would increase by 60 million to 70 million. However, the final completion was a net increase of 110 million.
By the end of 2017, China Unicom's IoT platform had also connected nearly 20,000 industry customers, with more than 80 million connections, and the current monthly growth rate exceeded 4 million. This is just the beginning. "It is estimated that by 2020, the total number of our IoT connections will exceed the number of human connections." On April 23, at the 2018 China Green Company Annual Meeting, Qiao Hui, chairman and general manager of China Mobile IoT Company, revealed, In cities such as Wuxi, Beijing, and Hangzhou, the number of China Mobile's IoT connections has exceeded the number of human connections.
And almost all technology giants and consulting agencies are convinced that in the next 10 to 15 years, every person's connection will leverage dozens or even hundreds of physical connections. These astronomical IoT devices will solve many "old and difficult" problems that have not been solved for decades in traditional industries.
In order to ban coal-fired heating and implement coal-to-gas replacement in Beijing, the entire Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region fell into a gas shortage at the end of 2017. Thousands of rural residents were frozen due to a severe shortage of natural gas, and a large number of households had to switch to electricity. heating, resulting in an increase of about 10% in peak loads on the city grid.
Economic scheduling requires accurate data, but in the past, in the era of traditional, manpower-based means, it was completely impossible to obtain these massive amounts of data in real time, accurately and completely. However, the great development of the Internet of Things has given us, for the first time, the means to solve these problems that we have been unable to do for decades. Massive Internet of Things connections allow us to collect and process various data in real time, so as to make accurate economic and service scheduling.
The cost savings and efficiency improvements brought by the Internet of Things are also full of expectations. For example, the demonstration pilot of intelligent manufacturing by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology: Baosteel's 1580 hot rolling intelligent workshop is a typical case of "smart factory". Through the collection of data and the establishment of analysis models through the Internet of Things, it can continue to carry out more intelligent optimization and transformation in the future.
In Hong Kong institutions, the maintenance and renovation of air conditioners is also fully applied with new technologies. A large amount of data is obtained through the Internet of Things, connected to the cloud, and completed through artificial intelligence. The annual electricity consumption of Hong Kong Airport is as high as 300 million Hong Kong dollars, 15% means saving 45 million Hong Kong dollars in real money.
Perhaps the real development of the Internet of Things has just begun, but we believe that the changes it will bring to us in the future may even be far greater than any previous technological change.