PRESS RELEASE: In May, China Telecom Shanghai worked with Huawei to complete its first passive IoT (PIoT) pilot verification at the Zijiang New Material Factory. The pilot verified the automatic inventory capability of 5.5G PIoT in warehousing and logistics.
PIoT represents an important breakthrough in the IoT field and is a key part of 5.5G IoT. PIoT technologies have been evolving over many years. Early applications, such as RFID, have been widely used in fields such as the fashion retail industry. PIoT is a typical application that implements interconnection of all things using mobile networks. It leverages the advantages of 5.5G base stations, which include higher modulation and demodulation sensitivity, longer reflection distances, higher accuracy, and continuous networking capabilities, to implement asset inventory management. PIoT technologies are widely used in logistics, stocktaking, and manufacturing. There is a trillion-level IoT market space waiting to be explored.
China Telecom Shanghai’s first PIoT pilot site is located in the aluminum foil warehouse at the Zijiang New Material Factory. The warehouse is used to store semi-finished aluminum foil. These materials are manually scanned in batches as they come into and leave the factory. This is inefficient, and makes it hard to manage the inventory in the warehouse. It is also easy to make a mistake and scan the wrong type or quantity of materials. These occasional mistakes result in material waste and other losses.
China Telecom Shanghai has deployed LampSite PIoT head-end devices on the rooftop of the warehouse, with labels attached to containers, and temperature sensors for both inbound and outbound materials. Together, they can monitor the temperature and quantity of inbound and outbound materials. This can effectively solve problems such as inefficient counting and inventory inconsistency, and it facilitates automatic asset management. Tests have shown that with this solution, the cost of stocktaking at a single warehouse is reduced by CNY120,000/year, and the cost of mistakes is reduced by CNY150,000/year. In the future, China Telecom Shanghai plans to verify more capabilities in more scenarios to meet multi-dimensional asset management requirements such as warehousing, inbound cycle monitoring, and automatic stocktaking.
China Telecom Shanghai is dedicated to innovation. The company has already overcome a variety of challenges in the 5.5G era and made great achievements in multiple fields, including deploying 10-Gbps networks, enabling 3CC continuous coverage, facilitating air-ground integration, and constructing intelligent base stations. China Telecom Shanghai has never stopped innovating or exploring new ways to create value. Looking ahead, China Telecom Shanghai will continue developing 5.5G technologies and applications such as PIoT, drive industry innovation, establish more and wider connections, and promote the digital and intelligent transformation of industries, in order to provide solid support for both the digital and intelligent economy and society at large.