5G development has reached a critical turning point

"5G currently covers all county towns and urban areas across the country. After network deployment and construction reaches a certain scale, 5G will begin its investment return period," said Wu Hequan, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, at the "Fourth 5G Gigabit Network Industry Forum."

"At present, the penetration rate of mobile phones in my country has reached 120.9%, and the number of consumer users has basically reached its ceiling. It is estimated that 5G users will account for 50% of all mobile users in the entire network in one year. However, the ARPU value of users newly migrated to 5G is lower than that of 5G users already on the network." Wu Hequan said, "The role of 5G is only to maintain the ARPU from declining." In his opinion, the main reason is that 5G capabilities have not been fully experienced in consumer applications, and he expects 5.5G to break the deadlock.

For consumer application scenarios, VR/AR and Internet of Vehicles can meet the needs of high bandwidth and low latency. However, on the one hand, the maturity of VR/AR products and the reliability and policies of Internet of Vehicles have restricted the market launch. On the other hand, 5G is still insufficient in capabilities, so 5G-A was born with this heavy burden.

In April 2023, the Internet of Things accounted for 54.1% of my country's cellular connections. Industrial applications and smart cities will accelerate the development of the Internet of Things. Lightweight, high density, wide coverage, low cost and long life will become the trend. 5.5G will focus on RedCap and P-loT.

"Although 5G was initially proposed for industrial applications, the idea of ​​consumer applications dominated the system architecture design. Now, 5G cannot fully adapt to the requirements of industrial applications for large uplink bandwidth, deterministic latency, high reliability and precise positioning. This is both an opportunity and a challenge for 5G-A," Wu Hequan emphasized.