ZTE Corporation (0763.HK / 000063.SZ), a global leading provider of integrated information and communication technology solutions, in partnership with China Telecom and other industry players, announced that their jointly developed project, "AI-enabled system for vehicle-road-cloud collaboration", has received the prestigious Best Moonshot Catalyst – Attendees' Choice Award at Digital Transformation World (DTW) 2025, hosted by TM Forum. This recognition highlights the significant contributions of China Telecom and ZTE in driving industrial innovation and accelerating the digital transformation of the global telecom industry.
The large-scale deployment of autonomous driving has led to a significant surge in demand for emergency road condition identification and multi-party collaborative decision-making in complex urban traffic. However, single-vehicle intelligence is constrained by sensor and computing power limitations, and there are blind areas in extreme weather conditions. Meanwhile, traditional optimization models, which depend on high-precision maps and massive drive test data, are also encountering challenges such as high hardware costs, difficulty in covering long-tail scenarios, and low multi-vehicle coordination efficiency.
ZTE's AIR Net autonomous network solution is instrumental in constructing a "vehicle-road-cloud collaborative autonomous driving" system. By integrating ZTE's 5G-A equipment with China Telecom's cloud infrastructure and smart transport AI capabilities, the collaboration has achieved a 24% reduction in hardware costs. Utilizing 5G URLLC technology, the system has significantly reduced transmission delay. AI lightweight computing units have been deployed at roadside edge nodes, enabling the classification and identification of over 20 transport participants. To date, the system has enhanced the accuracy of complex scenario identification by 40%, and reduced the multi-vehicle coordination response delay to under 100 ms, thereby assisting vehicle enterprises in achieving L4-level self-driving capabilities via progressive pathways.
Currently, the vehicle-road-cloud system confronts multiple challenges, including the high cost of roadside equipment, the openness of data capabilities, and difficulties in commercial closed-loop. To address these issues, ZTE plans to achieve dual breakthroughs in both technologies and commercial models based on its AIR Net solution.
Technologically, ZTE will focus on developing low-cost hardware and ultra-low-latency architecture to enhance the capability of integrating multi-source data. Commercially, ZTE will establish a scenario-based value model to clarify the profit paths for vehicle manufacturers and operators. Operators can apply the 5G-A network to enterprise service platforms by opening the vehicle-road cloud APIs and real-time traffic data APIs. This measure is expected to drive an annual increase in API revenue of over 20%.
Moving forward, this system will continuously facilitate the collaborative evolution of smart transportation from single-point intelligence to global intelligence, laying a solid foundation for a trillion-scale intelligent travel ecosystem.
