Stimulating growth in China's domestic IoT market

Yongjing Zhang represents Huawei at oneM2M’s technical plenary . In this Q&A, he describes China’s IoT market and the importance of interoperability in IoT solutions.

Please begin by describing your roles and responsibilities within oneM2M.

Zhang: I began working in oneM2M as the management, abstraction and semantics working group chair and recently took on a new role as a oneM2M technical plenary vice chair. Now, my job is to serve the oneM2M community from a higher perspective and this includes external cooperation with other IoT organizations.

Within Huawei, I work for the IoT platform product line in the cloud, AI product and service group as a senior standard manager. My team is responsible for standardization and research around the IoT platform. We also deal with supported service domains, such as the connected vehicle and smart cities

China is a large IoT market in the global context. What are your impressions of what is happening locally?

Zhang: I would say that China is among the fastest developing regions in the world in terms of the IoT market. The government plays a very important and active role forming national policies, innovation projects and industry development guidelines and standards. All these are beneficial to the IoT industry. On top of this, there is a lot of internal innovation momentum from different enterprises. Together, these factors stimulate the domestic IoT market and will help it grow rapidly.

For example, more than 500 cities in China are planned or being constructed as smart city projects. The size of the market is projected to be 1.87 trillion Renminbi ($271 billion) by 2021. IoT technologies Narrowband IoT and city-level IoT platforms are key enablers of this growth. We are seeing these trends in many of the projects where Huawei is participating, including Yingtan, which is the first NB-IoT enabled smart city in China.

Another recent growth story in China is the connected vehicle and smart transportation sector, thanks to the maturing Cellular Vehicle-to-Everything technology, such as a Long-Term Evolution vehicle, and the release of the vehicle-to-everything spectrum, 20MHz, at 5.9GHz. Several provinces and cities have built the test fields in closed sites, highways or open roads, such as Wuxi, for car-to-road coordinated autonomous driving and smart transportation. End-to-end technology, including the chipset, on-board unit, roadside unit platform and applications can now be provided together by industry partners including Huawei, Qualcomm and Datang — who are also members of oneM2M.

There are also many other IoT-driven or related initiatives happening in China across different domains, like Industrial IoT and internet and Internet+. I’d like to just highlight two key successful factors from all these activities — the availability of a common service IoT platform and the readiness of interoperable standards.

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