In a vast factory workshop, what happens when critical equipment suddenly fails? Calling in emergency support to fly in, or relying on traditional remote tools that offer a "foggy," unclear view of the problem, is often costly and inefficient. Today, Shanghai Unicom’s Wide Area 5G LAN technology offers an innovative solution. By leveraging advantages such as simplified deployment, low barriers to entry, and high security, it has made the concept of "an expert sitting in the office fixing equipment thousands of miles away" a reality.
A New O&M Paradigm: Moving from "Firefighting" to "Remote Collaboration"
Sudden equipment failures often mean production line stoppages and massive financial losses. Traditional maintenance models have long struggled with pain points such as the difficulty of booking experts, slow response times, high costs, and data insecurity. Scarce expert resources are often concentrated at headquarters or specific regions, meaning emergency business trips can cost thousands of yuan and take days to organize. Meanwhile, remote collaboration tools that rely on the public internet often fail to meet the strict real-time and security demands of industrial sites due to video lag, high latency, and lack of data security guarantees.
To address this industry-wide challenge, Shanghai Unicom has innovatively launched an industrial remote O&M (Operations and Maintenance) solution based on China Unicom’s 5G LAN OmniLink product. Relying on Wide Area 5G LAN technology, it provides enterprises with a flexible, secure, and efficient networking scheme. The solution supports the rapid creation of temporary secure channels on demand, achieving "zero reconstruction" of the enterprise intranet, which significantly lowers deployment thresholds and reduces security risks.
This solution has already been successfully piloted in industries such as warehousing and logistics, power grids, and mining/metallurgy. Taking Shanghai TeamViewer (Yuanxiuxia) as an example, the company established a Layer 2 network direct connection between AR glasses at a Beijing site and remote experts in Shanghai. This ensured smooth, lag-free audio and video during remote guidance, increasing single-session remote repair efficiency by 23%. Calculations show that compared to on-site repairs, this approach saves over 90% in travel and time costs annually, truly realizing the dual value of cost reduction/efficiency improvement and security protection.
Wide Area 5G LAN Opens an "End-to-End Exclusive High-Speed Lane"
5G LAN OmniLink is an innovative product launched by Unicom to meet enterprise cross-regional interconnection needs. Its core function is extending Local Area Network (LAN) capabilities to the Wide Area 5G network, breaking through traditional physical boundaries. It integrates geographically dispersed terminals into a constructed wide-area "Virtual LAN," enabling seamless Layer 2 network intercommunication for remote devices. Enterprises do not need to modify their existing networks; they can directly reuse native LAN capabilities such as DHCP dynamic addressing, network service self-discovery, and MAC address authentication, enjoying an operational experience within the 5G environment consistent with traditional LANs.
In remote maintenance scenarios, this technology demonstrates three key advantages:
• Ultra-Low Latency and HD Real-Time Interaction: Field engineers wear AR smart glasses and access Unicom’s 5G private network via 5G CPE to establish a point-to-point direct connection with remote experts. End-to-end latency is stably controlled within 50 milliseconds, and video feeds are smooth and lag-free. This supports real-time annotation, gesture guidance, and multi-angle switching by experts, simulating a "hand-in-hand" on-site guidance experience.
• End-to-End Physical Isolation, Guiding Industrial Data Security: All audio/video streams, operation commands, and equipment data are transmitted in a closed loop within the 5G private network's Layer 2, completely bypassing the public internet to achieve physical isolation. This architecture eliminates enterprise concerns regarding the leakage of sensitive process data.
• Plug-and-Play with Zero Network Reconstruction: The solution utilizes a lightweight deployment mode that requires no large-scale changes to the enterprise's existing network architecture. Field equipment simply needs a 5G module or CPE terminal inserted; once powered on, it automatically accesses the private network. This "connect on demand, disconnect when done" capability is particularly suitable for flexible scenarios such as temporary emergency repairs, process verification, and remote factory audits.
Future Outlook: Wide Area 5G LAN Accelerates the Reconstruction of Industrial Collaboration
As a typical application of 5G LAN OmniLink in the industrial sector, Shanghai Unicom’s remote O&M solution provides a replicable digital collaboration template for the manufacturing industry. With its "zero reconstruction, ease of use, and high security" features, it offers a "plug-and-play" network foundation for the digital transformation of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), accelerating the implementation of digital business scenarios.
As 5G LAN network capabilities continue to open up nationwide, Shanghai Unicom is joining forces with ecosystem partners to expand this model to more high-value scenarios, such as remote assembly guidance, cross-plant collaborative debugging, and supply chain joint quality inspection.
In the future, 5G LAN OmniLink will continue to be driven by a "Technology + Scenario" dual engine, helping enterprises break geographical restrictions to build a secure, agile, and intelligent new ecosystem for cross-regional collaboration—truly realizing the vision of "making connections more valuable and making O&M understand production better."