The first commercial 5G local area network in Zhejiang province has successfully transformed the China Jushi fiberglass factory into a highly efficient, unmanned smart manufacturing hub.
On the intelligent production lines of China Jushi Co, a seamless dance of human-machine collaboration is unfolding. As the building materials industry accelerates its transition from traditional manufacturing to smart manufacturing, fiberglass — a critical material for wind power, new energy vehicles and 5G communications — has become a focal point for technological breakthroughs.
China Jushi, a core enterprise of China National Building Material Co Ltd, stands as a global leader in the fiberglass industry. The company boasts the world's largest production capacity, holding a commanding 40 percent market share in China and 24 percent globally. Over the years, China Jushi has maintained its industry-leading position in scale, technology and quality, earning prestigious accolades such as the China Grand Awards for Industry, the National Science and Technology Progress Award, and recognition as a national intelligent manufacturing demonstration factory.
To further accelerate its digital transformation, China Unicom Zhejiang Branch recently achieved the deep commercial integration of a 5G LAN at China Jushi's No 5 factory in Jiaxing, Zhejiang. This milestone project marks the very first commercial use case of 5G LAN in Zhejiang, helping Jushi build a comprehensive 5G-powered factory.
The advanced 5G LAN technology supports 5G-native Layer 2 networking, allowing terminals to be highly flexible and plug-and-play. Crucially, it maintains the enterprise's original network architecture, significantly lowering the difficulty of upgrading production lines to 5G. The technology can create specialized "groups" for enterprise terminals at Layer 2 or Layer 3, providing flexible communication services such as terminal interconnection and isolation.
At the Jiaxing No 5 factory, 5G terminals are installed directly into control cabinets, deeply integrating with the factory's programmable logic controllers — the "brains" of the machinery. By utilizing advanced 5G LAN technology, the factory has constructed a seamless end-to-end network. This enables real-time collaboration between different programmable logic controllers and ensures instant data sharing with the supervisory control and data acquisition system. This signifies a major step forward for China Unicom's 5G Private Network Plus 3.0, proving that 5G has deeply penetrated the core production links of industrial manufacturing.
Stepping into the No 5 factory, the results are visually striking. Industrial robots navigate the workshop in perfect order, executing material transport and loading with flawless precision. Rows of mechanical arms complete complex procedures with every bend and stretch, while rolls of fiberglass packaging materials are automatically elevated within the smart warehouse. Only a handful of technicians are needed to debug products or machinery. In the factory's intelligent control center, massive display screens continuously update dense data charts, providing a digitized, visualized and full-process monitoring system for multiple production lines.
Song Guangmin, director of the industrial internet support center at China Unicom Zhejiang Branch, highlighted the philosophy behind this transformation. "From the very beginning of the factory's construction, we established a foundational requirement for the full connection of data elements," Song said. "What we see now is a 'mega-factory' in Zhejiang — a fully connected operation based on the deep integration of 5G, IT and operational technologies."
Song noted that the factory leverages AI large models for extensive data collection, analysis and scenario applications. "The massive unmanned technologies operating here are the result of fusing new-generation information technologies, represented by 5G, with AI large models. This has dramatically boosted China Jushi's competitiveness, increasing its production efficiency by over 20 percent since the project was implemented," he said. The customized computing power required for these AI applications is seamlessly provided by China Unicom's supercomputing center in Wuzhen, Zhejiang.
During a recent visit, Fan Ji'an, chief big data scientist at China Unicom, highly praised the deep integration of the 5G factory. China Unicom and Jushi have agreed to expand their cooperation in industrial manufacturing, including reliability verification of cross-SMF 5G LAN networking, extending 5G LAN to multi-campus wide-area networks and building 5G private networks for China Jushi's new factories.
Yu Yadong, director of the information technology center at China Jushi, outlined the ambitious road ahead: "The 5G factory will not only focus on internal digital and intelligent transformation, but also expand externally. Based on China Unicom's unified multi-campus 5G private network solution, we aim to connect upstream and downstream industries, establish a wide-area 5G LAN, and promote our advanced fiberglass production technologies from the Tongxiang headquarters to global branches in Chengdu, Sichuan province, Jiujiang, Jiangxi province, and Suez in Egypt, leading the high-quality development of the global fiberglass industry."
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