ofo and Huawei jointly develop smart locks and build shared bicycle IoT scenarios

Recently, China Telecom, Huawei and ofo jointly held a press conference to announce that the IoT smart lock based on NB-IOT (Narrow Band Internet of Things, narrowband Internet of Things) technology is fully commercialized. past 5 months.

For the Internet of Things, scale equals value. Companies such as Amazon, Tmall, JD.com, Xiaomi, and iFlytek are all vying for deployment, but the entry points are almost all around smart homes. At this time, the surging trend of shared bicycles made Huawei's eyes shine, and it chose to cooperate with ofo.

Why did Huawei choose ofo? Besides scale, what else does ofo have?

Exponential benefits of scale

As early as 2015, Huawei launched the open source Internet of Things platform Huawei Lite OS, which is based on low power consumption and fast startup kernel. It provides a unified API through open source, hoping to connect more intelligent hardware terminals and become a leader in the field of Internet of Things. Android platform. Therefore, "connection" is an important part of Huawei's IoT strategy. Therefore, from a strategic perspective, the emergence of ofo has well completed the closed loop of Huawei's application layer hardware terminals.

In terms of quantity, the number of small yellow bicycles currently exceeds 6.5 million, and it plans to enter 20 countries and 200 cities by the end of the year, with the number of bicycles exceeding 20 million. Ofo has signed strategic cooperation agreements with traditional bicycle giants such as Feige, Phoenix, and Fujitec. Feige and Phoenix each provide an annual production capacity of over 5 million, and Fujitec provides an annual production capacity of over 10 million. The advantage of production capacity integration leads the company in the field of shared bicycles.

 In addition, a very practical point is that ofo's product design concept is "modular" and "lock-car separation". Therefore, when ofo replaces the smart lock, it does not need to make changes to the car body. ofo has the ability to promote NB-IoT smart locks in large quantities in a short period of time.

From the data point of view, big data usually has three characteristics: the total amount of data is large and requires a lot of storage space and analysis capabilities; there are many types of data and low value density; and it requires high processing speed. In short, big data analysis is the process of analyzing the typical behaviors of typical users from a large amount of data with low meaning and relevance. Looking back at shared bicycles, the tidal effect is the most intuitive travel data. Changes in the user's location reflect the flow of users to work, the flow of users shopping, etc. in the city. Combined with user identity information, a direct user portrait is formed.

In the shared bicycle industry, ofo has the highest financing amount, the largest number of bicycles and cities, and its user data is more representative. Therefore, cooperation with ofo will be of great help to Huawei's NB-IoT network construction and communication data recovery.

What is the optimal communication solution for shared bicycles?

Huawei provides ofo with a communication method based on NB-IoT chips. From the perspective of the shared bicycle industry, the current communication methods are mainly divided into two types: long connection and short connection.

Long connection refers to the real-time communication between the car lock and the base station. The characteristic is that the base station and the server can receive information such as the location of the vehicle and the status of the car lock in real time. The disadvantage is high power consumption. Therefore, long-term connection solutions need to be equipped with charging solutions, such as charging hubs and solar panels, represented by Xiaolan Bicycle.

Short connection means that when the bicycle is not in use by the user, the communication between the bicycle lock and the base station is not real-time, and at certain intervals, the bicycle lock will wake up regularly for communication. Represented by ofo and Mobai.

Whether it is a long connection or a short connection, there is no advantage or disadvantage in itself. They are just solutions to communication. Each communication method needs to achieve a balance between power consumption, transmission distance and bandwidth, and find the golden point between the three. The solution at the split point is the optimal one.

In contrast, NB-IoT combines many advantages and is characterized by long transmission distance, low transmission bandwidth, and low power consumption. According to ofo, NB-IoT has three major features: First, it has wider coverage. The wall penetration of NB-IoT signals far exceeds that of existing networks. Even if users are deep in underground parking lots, they can use NB-IoT technology to switch on and off smoothly. lock; secondly, it can connect to more devices. NB-IoT technology has more than 100 times higher connection capacity than traditional mobile communication networks. In other words, the same base station can connect to more ofo IoT smart lock devices to avoid disconnection; The third is lower power consumption. The standby time of NB-IoT devices can be used for 2-3 years without charging existing batteries.

If the NB-IoT network is applied in the field of Internet of Vehicles, it may be abandoned due to low transmission bandwidth, because the Internet of Vehicles has a large amount of data that needs to be transmitted in real time. In contrast, shared bicycles only return positioning, lock status, vehicle status and other information at the data layer, and have low bandwidth requirements. On the operation layer, they have high requirements for low power consumption and transmission distance, which is exactly in line with the operational needs of shared bicycles. consistent.

The combined force of industrial capital

From a capital perspective, ofo is backed by industrial capital represented by Alibaba, Didi and Xiaomi. Among them, Alibaba Cloud is the leader in the cloud computing industry, Didi is developing smart cities based on the Internet of Vehicles, and Xiaomi is also laying out the Internet of Things industry with the Mijia ecosystem as the core. Although it seems that Huawei and Xiaomi are competitors in the mobile phone industry, in the field of Internet of Things, Huawei is a supplier of chips, equipment, and networks, while Xiaomi is good at smart hardware and cloud computing. In the field of Internet of Things, Huawei is a more comprehensive supplier. In essence, the interests of Huawei and ofo investors are consistent.

Currently, China's three major operators have begun to transform existing communication networks to support the use of NB-IoT. According to the requirements of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, the number of NB-IoT base stations nationwide will reach 400,000 by the end of the year, and the scale of domestic NB-IoT base stations is expected to reach 1.5 million by 2020. As the number of NB-IoT base stations increases and ofo continues to expand into cities, the cooperation between Huawei and ofo will be fully launched.