The future of things is the Internet of Things in Chinese tech

“Connectivity” probably is the most heard term at the 2017 Consumer Electronics Show (CES), along with “innovation”.

All companies, no matter how large or small, American or overseas, are trying to come up with solutions for many of the world’s most challenging problems through the Internet of Things (IoT), and they are touching literally every facet of our lives.

Like never before, China’s delegations, including Huawei, Lenovo, Haier, ZTE, Xiaomi and many small startups, queued up to flaunt their innovations, trying to live up to all of this year’s hype with their exhibits ranging from smart homes and smart cars to smart cities and the IoT.

More importantly, Chinese companies are joining the international competition by not only operating in accordance with the industry standards, but also by striving to be part of the standards by serving on various industry committees.

Chinese telecom equipment manufacturer ZTE Corp joined LORA (low power wide area) in June, becoming one of the board members with influence on the deployment and development of a low-power worldwide network.

The phrase IoT, originally coined in 1999 by a British technology guru who co-founded the auto-ID center at MIT, refers to the network of physical objects that contain embedded technology communications and senses or interacts with their internal states or the external environment.

According to Gartner Inc, the whole IoT business will generate roughly $310 billion in revenue by 2020 with a compound growth rate of over 60 percent. The growth rate in such fields as vehicle, energy, industry and household security can rocket to 80 percent.

The development of IoT services currently faces many challenges — the difficulties in improving the existing network infrastructure and access, the need to accommodate exponential connection growth and the requirements for bandwidth and reliability.

However, “we strongly believe that a wide-spectrum of innovative IoT applications will keep emerging,” said Chen Jie, chief information officer of ZTE Corp, at CES.

IoT provides tremendous opportunities to industry players and consumers, said Chen. “It will change how society works and how individuals live,” Chen said. “We’re on the eve of a powerful new IoT-enabled revolution in business and as a global society.”

Chen revealed ZTE’s five-year strategic plan, called M-ICT 2.0, which consists of virtualization, openness, intelligence, cloudification and IoT VOICE. Specifically, ZTE is focusing on smart city, smart home, industrial internet and car internet.

To date, ZTE has been involved in the construction of more than 150 smart city projects across China.

“We have a very active participation in the smart city business,” Chen said. “We offer solutions including smart metering, smart lighting and smart parking for municipal and regional governments.”

The smart city execution in Yinchuan, Ningxia Hui autonomous region, is one of ZTE’s acclaimed projects. Under the terms of the contract signed in 2014, ZTE will help Yinchuan install smart transportation, surveillance, community, environmental protection, all-in-one cards, tourism, an enterprise cloud, government and a big data analytics center.

ZTE has also created several vertical IoT solutions with local partners, launching a 5G innovative lab with China Mobile last June.

In Paris, “we cooperated with our partners to provide a smart lighting solution for the city, a project we named ‘The City of Lights’”, said Chen. Through sensors in smart street lamps, the system is able to centralize resource management and reduce energy costs by 30 percent.

Chang Jun