China Unicom's Smart City Initiative Shows Early Results with 360 Billion Yuan Investment over 4 Years
Since releasing its "Smart City" development strategy on September 4, 2012, China Unicom has built its development model on three major networks—urban optical networks, WCDMA wireless networks, and WLAN—supported by nine data center bases and a nationwide cloud-computing-based unified Smart City platform, promoting a "co-construction, aggregation, and openness" development model to advance Smart City development.
As of April 2013, China Unicom has completed strategic agreements with local governments in more than 150 cities (urban districts) across 26 provinces, among which 39 of the first batch of 56 key cities with open HSPA+ networks have completed agreements. During the signing process, most local governments explicitly proposed requirements for building application platforms, with cooperation content focused on hot industry application areas such as mobile government affairs, intelligent transportation, smart healthcare, urban safety, environmental monitoring, smart education, and smart logistics. As of March this year, China Unicom has cumulatively developed 26.52 million industry application users, effectively achieving business transformation while well serving national economic development and the informatization of central state-owned enterprises.
Since the integrated restructuring, China Unicom has attached great importance to the opportunities brought by industry informatization, treating it as an important means of differentiated competitive advantage, giving priority guarantees in human, material, and financial resources, and innovatively establishing the Group Customer Business Department and the industry director responsibility system to deeply explore business opportunities in industry informatization. After nearly four years of exploration, it has now formed an industry application system based on the "three major fields" of mobile internet, Internet of Things, and e-commerce, and the "eight major industries" of government, finance, logistics, aviation, automotive, energy, healthcare, and public utilities, developing dozens of industry informatization applications including mobile office, mobile law enforcement, automotive informatization, urban management, digital industry and commerce, network invoicing, customs inspection, mobile business development, vehicle survey, environmental protection monitoring, remote meter reading, and power line inspection.
In recent years, during the urbanization process, urban infrastructure, resources and environment, and social governance have faced a series of problems, especially those caused by the interconnections between these systems—such as unintegrated information, low resource utilization, and lack of top-level coordinated decision analysis—bringing a series of major issues to urban operations. Smart City leverages new-generation information technology to better achieve intelligent management and coordination with increasingly complex urban entity systems, attracting worldwide attention. Currently, developed countries such as South Korea, Singapore, the United States, and Sweden have successively begun implementing "Smart City" development strategies.
As one of China's three major telecommunications operators, China Unicom took the lead in proposing the "Smart City" strategy, earnestly fulfilling social responsibilities, and striving to integrate its own development into the endogenous needs of social economy and urban development, hoping to leverage its network and platform advantages to collaborate with the industry chain to promote application development that meets the needs of individual and government/enterprise customers, reshaping its position in the industry chain. Currently, the "government + service provider + content provider" model in the Smart City industry chain has been widely recognized, and telecom operators, as providers of operations and applications, have become an important force in the industry. China Unicom has proposed to position itself in the Smart City industry chain as a service provider of basic information and communication facilities, a provider of the Smart City cloud hosting platform, and an aggregator of smart applications and basic information data, and has established long-term work goals, namely to unite government departments, integrate industry resources, aggregate smart applications, create a win-win business model and sustainable operation model, achieving "wisdom" in management and "benefits" for people's livelihood, jointly creating a smart urban future.
In terms of basic network construction, over the past four years, China Unicom has invested a total of 360 billion yuan, built 210,000 fiber-core kilometers of urban optical cables, created a WCDMA wireless network covering all cities at and above the township level nationwide, major transportation routes, and tourist attractions, and deployed and commenced construction of 9 major cloud computing and data center bases. China Unicom adheres to the 3G network leadership strategy, continuously improving wide-area coverage and deep coverage of the network, and has now built WCDMA HSPA+ networks with downlink speeds of 21Mbps in more than 330 cities nationwide.
In terms of Smart City support platforms, China Unicom will complete the construction of the Smart City cloud platform in 2013 to meet local government Smart City needs, and uniformly host, operate, and incubate various industry application systems. Using cloud computing underlying technologies to achieve basic resource management and scheduling of the cloud platform, scientifically planning concentration levels, balancing overall investment costs and customer experience, unifying clustered business specification standards, aggregating industry data, and planning 7 Smart City industry application clustered businesses—urban management, sales management, local e-government, video surveillance, media publishing, operating vehicles, and low-flow data monitoring—based on government agreements and business development needs.
Currently, China is in an accelerated stage of urbanization development. As a super-large state-owned telecommunications enterprise and a main force in informatization construction, China Unicom will always adhere to a customer-centric approach, uphold the concept of "innovation changes the world," take "becoming an innovative service leader in information life" as its corporate development vision, rely on new-generation information technologies such as mobile internet, cloud computing, and the Internet of Things, leverage its advantages in informatization planning, construction, operation, and service, and under government leadership, work with all parties in the industry chain to jointly promote Smart City development, achieving the goals of "strengthening government, prospering industry, and benefiting people's livelihood" in Smart City development.