Virtual operators in the 5G era: new opportunities and challenges coexist

The 5G era will bring differentiated intelligent scenarios and unlimited possibilities to society. At the same time, the arrival of 5G will also bring more new development opportunities to virtual operators, because 5G plays a greater role in vertical industries, which coincides with the business development of virtual operators. Through 5G, virtual operators can better empower vertical industries and help them transform and upgrade.

With the advent of the 5G era, the service environment of communication manufacturers has undergone major changes. If they simply continue to revolve around in the small circle of communications, firstly, the investment is too large and it is difficult to recover, and secondly, although the connection between people has not yet exerted its full strength in the 4G era, it has reached a point where it needs to be changed. In a word: the communication industry needs to diverge, needs to combine with various vertical industries, needs to connect things, needs the industrial Internet, and needs you to be in me and me to be in you.

In January 2021, China Unicom held a virtual business partner conference, at which a pilot launch ceremony for IoT resale was held, marking the start of the mobile IoT resale business. It is understood that China Unicom's IoT resale plan follows the industry base price in terms of tariffs, and adjusts the IoT resale tariffs through small iterations; in terms of management, China Unicom will manage by scenario and category, and promote it step by step and agilely. The first phase will only resell connections, focusing on the construction of system capabilities and the trial operation of full-process management capabilities; the second phase will consider the resale of non-connected application services. Gradually build an IoT application ecosystem platform, continuously innovate in vertical industry application fields such as industrial Internet, consumer electronics, smart cities, sharing economy, transportation, etc., to meet the personalized and differentiated application needs of various industries.

In the future, the IoT resale business will become the dual driving force for the development of the resale business together with the basic resale business, helping mobile resale companies to develop from connected companies to providers of platforms, ecosystems, and solutions, and providing strong support for a complete transformation of development models and development momentum.

With the acceleration of 5G commercialization and the further opening of the mobile resale market, business entities are becoming more diversified, and massive application needs are gradually emerging. Virtual operators can take 5G, RCS, eSIM, etc. as development directions, focus on exploring enterprise-level cloud service solutions, 5G Internet of Things, 5G messaging and other businesses, continue to increase innovative exploration of new businesses, and provide higher-level and richer application services.

In the future, the positioning of virtual operators will be to gradually transform from previous communications resource wholesale companies to the role of ecological service and platform construction.

Uyou Interconnect is one of the first companies to obtain the pilot qualification of virtual operators. So far, it has obtained the qualification to resell the mobile communication services of China Telecom, China Unicom and China Mobile, and was the first to obtain the official license of virtual operators issued by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology. It now has tens of millions of code resources, millions of users, and business coverage across the country. It won the "Best Virtual Operator Enterprise-Golden Tripod Award". As a leading company among virtual operators, Uyou has been working hard in the data card market for many years. The products it launched are also unique and well recognized by the market, which can create new market opportunities.