The winners of the "ICT China Case Collection and Release 2022" activity at PT Expo China 2022 were announced. The "High-Reliability 5G Private Network Based on the Kite-like Solution in Smart Mines" project jointly carried out by Huawei, China Unicom Shanxi Branch, and China Unicom (Shanxi) Industry Internet won one of the first placements for excellent innovative applications.
Hosted by PT Expo China and organized by the China Association of Communication Enterprises, the "ICT China Case Collection and Release 2022" activity aims to promote fundamental research on ICT applications and stimulate innovation with key, cutting-edge, and disruptive technologies as the center. As a result, this will fast-track the process for building China into a manufacturing, quality, network, and digital power, and firmly establish benchmark ICT applications for cities and industries.
The Yanjiahe Coal Mine Project in Shanxi is the world's first high-reliability 5G private network project using the Kite-like solution. Leveraging the innovation capability of China Unicom's 5GCtoB One Telco Cloud, the project has achieved commercial use of high-reliability campus network capabilities. The conventional coal mining industry used to face a lot of challenges such as inadequate intelligence, harsh working environments, and prominent health and safety issues. Yanjiahe mine has overhauled such conventional mining networks. It uses highly reliable and secure 5G networks and applications to replace manual work underground, improving the working environment and safety for mine workers. On the high-reliability 5G private network for coal mines, a 5GC emergency control plane is deployed with the unified edge gateway (kite M), greatly improving the reliability of the mine production network, and yielding a reliability increase from 99.99% to 99.999% when compared with a generic private 5G network. Even if the external optical fiber of the mining area is disconnected, the coal mine private network can still run normally. The high-reliability 5G private network based on the Kite-like solution has been applied to the core production system of Yanjiahe mine. It has changed the approach to excavation and fully mechanized faces of the coal mine, thus making it intelligent. On the excavation face, excavators can be remotely controlled from aboveground for automatic unattended excavation. As for the fully mechanized face, the main devices now can be centrally monitored and controlled from the mine dispatch and command center with related parameter values intuitively displayed in real time. The high-reliability 5G private network based on the Kite-like solution has also replaced conventional underground wired network-based dispatching with voice and video converged dispatching, significantly improving the reliability and convenience of underground dispatching.
After the 5G-based intelligent reconstruction, Yanjiahe Coal Mine has become a safer mine with less personnel, reducing costs and improving efficiency. The number of employees in a single shift is reduced from about 30 to fewer than 10. The communication system in the excavation face has become wireless, reducing the OPEX generated from cables. In addition, the high-reliability private network ensures continuous production of the coal mine and zero downtime through network faults. The high-reliability 5G private network project based on the Kite-like solution stood out among the numerous competitive projects, which signifies that its innovation and commercial value has been comprehensively recognized by industry. China Unicom will continue to work with partners to introduce the Kite-like solution based high-reliability 5G private networks to more mining enterprises, fueling the intelligent transformation of the mining industry.