novelnext Chapter 232 Partners
Chapter 232 Partners
In the second week after the API interface was opened, Han Lu's phone rang three times in one morning.
The business managers from the three telecom operators called on the same morning, not to discuss orders, but to discuss cooperation.
Han Lu summarized the three phone calls into a single message and sent it to Zuo Cheng: "They have something important to discuss, I suggest you go in person."
Zuo Cheng read the message and replied with two words: Arrange.
Four days later, the chief negotiators from the three operators appeared simultaneously in conference room 402. It wasn't competition, it was a collaboration. Their proposals were identical: to integrate the Tianqiong constellation into the nationwide 5G network as the standard solution for satellite backhaul, specifically addressing blind spots in areas traditional base stations cannot cover, such as subway tunnels, high mountains and hills, and deep-sea islands.
The coverage density and latency performance of the Tianqiong constellation had been independently tested by the three operators before, and the data was there. What truly made the negotiations time-consuming was the business structure. The operators hoped to trade volume for lower prices; the larger the access scale, the lower the unit access fee. Zuo Cheng's position was that price was negotiable, but the 402 access standard and data protocol must become an industry norm that all three operators would jointly adhere to, and overall interoperability should not be affected by any one operator's proprietary modifications.
On the second day of negotiations, Chen Hao added a figure: if the standards are not unified, each operator will maintain its own access protocol, which will increase the technical operation costs by at least $300 million per year. This is even less cost-effective than lowering the price.
This statement ended the disagreement.
The final agreed-upon solution satisfied both parties. The Tianqiong constellation became the sole standard solution for 5G gap-filling satellite backhaul nationwide. The three contracts totaled over six billion US dollars, with a five-year term and settlement based on actual access volume. The 402 access standard was written into the agreement appendix and cannot be unilaterally modified.
At the signing ceremony, a representative from China Mobile made a frank statement: "Building our own base stations to cover rural areas is too costly. Using Tianqiong (a mobile communication platform), one yuan can do the work of ten yuan. We didn't want to admit this before, but now we have no choice."
Han Lu wrote this sentence into the internal minutes and marked it with four words: "Can be made public."
The integration of quantum computing by the five major banks is progressing even faster. As early as three months ago, financial regulators began to focus on the threat posed by quantum computing to the RSA encryption system. An ICBC vice president internally raised a question: If a quantum computer can one day crack existing banking encryption systems, what will we use to protect them?
The answer quickly pointed to 402.
Quantum encryption counters quantum attacks, using the very weapon against it. Tianyan Quantum Cloud's quantum key distribution service can construct an unbreakable communication barrier using the principles of quantum mechanics itself, before a quantum computer can crack traditional RSA encryption. In principle, as long as quantum mechanics is correct, this barrier cannot be bypassed.
Five major banks simultaneously integrated with Tianyan Quantum Cloud's encryption service. At the press conference following the signing ceremony, an ICBC representative made a statement that has been widely quoted by major financial media outlets: "The battlefield for financial security has moved from the software layer to the physical layer. We are not buying a product; we are installing a lock on the entire financial system that is physically unbreakable."
When Zuo Cheng was later interviewed and asked about the significance of the five major banks simultaneously accessing the platform, his answer was brief: "Quantum encryption and quantum attacks are two sides of the same coin. Previously, banks used traditional encryption to protect digital assets; now, in the quantum era, we need to use quantum encryption to protect quantum-era assets. This isn't a choice, it's inevitable. We just built this door a few years earlier."
Han Lu would summarize the day's contract progress before leaving get off work each day. In the following week, the pace of signing contracts did not slow down; on the contrary, it accelerated.
State Grid Corporation of China is the sixth centrally-administered state-owned enterprise to sign the contract. The space-based photovoltaic ground receiving stations began grid connection testing three months ago. This time, State Grid directly proposed connecting all space-based photovoltaic receiving stations nationwide to the national energy dispatch network to achieve real-time power regulation and inter-regional surplus allocation. While the contract amount isn't the highest, its strategic significance is the greatest, signifying that the 402 energy technology has moved from experimentation to the core dispatch system of State Grid.
CNPC's requirement was communication for its offshore drilling platforms. Some drilling platforms in the deep waters of the South China Sea are more than 300 kilometers from the nearest land. Traditional satellite communication suffers from high latency and low bandwidth, directly impacting real-time control and safety monitoring. The Tianqiong constellation's 28-millisecond latency and high bandwidth completely solved this problem. In their report after testing, CNPC's technical team wrote: "The stability of this communication link is two orders of magnitude higher than our previous solutions."
China Railway's cooperation focuses on the integration of intelligent transportation systems. The national railway dispatching network generates massive amounts of data, and existing ground communication infrastructure suffers from numerous signal blind spots in tunnel and mountainous sections. The coverage of the Tianqiong constellation addresses this gap, and the real-time dispatching capabilities of quantum computing have also attracted significant interest from railway dispatching centers.
Within a week, twelve central state-owned enterprises signed strategic cooperation agreements with 402. The amounts in each agreement varied, but one point remained consistent across all agreements: 402's technical access standards and data protocols would serve as the basic framework for the cooperation, and future system upgrades and iterations would be primarily provided by 402.
On the day the signing ceremony concluded, Han Lu compiled a detailed table categorizing all partners by industry: three telecommunications operators, five state-owned banks, State Grid, CNPC, China Railway, China State Construction Engineering Corporation, China Aerospace Science and Industry Corporation, China Resources Power, China Merchants Port, and COFCO Group. This covered six vital sectors of the national economy: telecommunications, finance, energy, transportation, ports, and grain.
She added a summary line at the end of the table, but without writing any numbers, only one sentence: This table does not represent the contract amount, but the access density of China's economic infrastructure.
After reading this, Zuo Cheng remained silent for a moment, then said, "You're right."
Han Lu stacked the contracts together, calculated the thickness, and said, "The replacement cost is ten times higher than the contract amount."
"This is the real moat," Zuo Cheng said. "It's not that the technology is so advanced, it's that the cost of replacement is too high."
Late at night after the signing ceremony, Han Lu added a note at the bottom of the summary table: "The central enterprise matrix is a locked-in asset; where is the incremental asset?"
She thought for a moment and sent the form to Zuo Cheng. On the table sat a cold coffee, and a thick stack of contracts, each representing an industry, a system, and a behemoth whose foundation would not easily change from now on.
Zuo Cheng picked up a pen, circled the word "increase," and wrote four characters inside the circle.
Smart city.