5G technology is one of Huawei Technologies Inc. (Huawei) businesses that remained steady amid industry challenges in the past year. In the recently held Asia Pacific (APAC) 5G Industry Forum (5GIF), the Shenzhen-based firm further highlighted the key innovations that the technology is capable of to push Industry 4.0 forward.

Carrying the theme “5G Inspiring new value to accelerate Industry 4.0,” forum speakers, who came from China, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, and Thailand, urged 800 participants to strengthen ecosystem cooperation and joint innovation to support industry digitalization.

While everyone agrees that 5G will revolutionize the global economy, shape business growth, and commercial and digital service acceleration, Huawei believes that the adoption of the technology also comes with challenges.

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“There are many challenges to overcome as 5G requires not only innovators but also brave practitioners to drive the development.” said Dennis Xiao, president of Huawei Technologies APAC. “In Thailand, Siriraj Hospital is a good example, they are facing many difficulties to transform traditional processes, but the hospital has finally started to use 5G services for remote patient monitoring, connected ambulances, and unmanned medicine vehicles to provide a higher quality of medication service to their patients.”

ICT investments

The forum also highlighted the rapid deployment of 5G across APAC which paved the way for innovations in vertical industries. Continued ICT investment and cooperation will better serve the businesses of the region, accelerate industry digital transformation, and develop the local partner ecosystems necessary for inspiring new value and accelerating industry 4.0.

Dustin Kehoe, service director for APAC and the Middle East, Global Data, mentioned that more than 15,000 Asean enterprises are spending over $246 billion for current ICT transformation and that industries are starting to use 5G in manufacturing, oil and gas, healthcare, and other campus-based networks.

“5GtoB will bring great benefit to the global economy and Huawei proposes a 1+N 5G target network to fulfill the requirements of video backhaul, machine vision, remote control, and real-time positioning,” said Daisy Zhu, VP of Wireless Marketing at Huawei.

She then shared several examples of automation in manufacturing, airports, and shipping ports highlighting 5G’s role in providing greater bandwidth, lower latency, and positioning.

The forum covered two discussion panels, panelists from university, consultants, government, and telecom operators had come up a common view for the industry standards, public policies, and regulation with economic benefits to capitalize on creating growth, improving quality and maximizing efficiencies in product lines.

The second panel discussed the challenges and opportunities of 5G ecosystems cooperation. Huawei and operators have already established a number of IoT-based partnership cooperation frameworks in the past few years, which can help build a faster local ecosystem. Moving forward, the stakeholders will explore more possible business use cases to create new commercial value, together with innovators, start-ups, and solutions providers to offer 5G-enabled vertical industry solutions to accelerate industry digitalization.