What will be the consequences if all three major operators upgrade to 5G in five years?

Seeing that domestic communication companies are all building 5G base stations, if the three major domestic operators all upgrade to 5G in five years, what consequences will it bring to our society? Will there be bad things waiting for us? In this regard, Wu Feng, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, made the latest judgment.

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5G is the main trend of future development

According to the Global Times, the "5G and Carbon Neutrality, Carbon Peak Forum" of the World 5G Conference was held as scheduled in Beijing. The forum brought together many elites in the 5G field. While actively discussing the future development of 5G technology and the outlook for 6G technology, they also mentioned another theme of the forum, namely the deep integration of 5G technology and energy. In other words, the development of 5G technology is expected to promote the green development of the national economy. The realization of the "dual carbon" goal is also another theme of the future development of 5G technology, and it is also the direction that industry elites will focus on exploring in the next stage.

But everyone believes that 5G is moving towards the future, especially after new energy vehicles have become an important part of the Internet of Things, we can feel the importance of 5G technology and the importance of the dual carbon goals. But as discussed at the forum, the development of 5G technology is not a tall building out of thin air, it requires a certain energy foundation to achieve the results we want.

Wei Jinwu, deputy director of China Unicom Research Institute, said at the forum: Compared with 4G, the energy consumption of 5G base stations has exceeded 5 times, but in order to develop 5G on a large scale as soon as possible, major operators can only continue to increase the construction density of 5G base stations in the medium and high frequency bands, which means that we have to invest more energy in 5G technology.

5G consumes a huge amount of energy

Many people are worried that the arrival of 5G technology will have an adverse impact on our lives. This kind of worrying behavior is really meaningless. Does it mean that the 5G plan that has gathered a large number of industry elites, invested a lot of resources, and held hundreds of large-scale meetings to improve it will cause damage to our lives? This is obviously nonsense. And we can see from the development of 4G to 5G that the upgrade of information technology has a huge impact on our society, but this impact is mostly developing in a good direction. Instead of worrying about the adverse effects of 5G technology, we should pay more attention to the energy investment required for the development of 5G technology.

Someone once asked such a question: What will happen if all three major Chinese operators upgrade to 5G in five years? In this regard, Wu Feng, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, made the latest judgment that if the three major operators really upgrade to 5G in 2027, their power consumption during operation will exceed 2.1% of the national electricity consumption. This figure is much higher than the power consumed by the digital center, and it also urges us to consider the energy distribution required by 5G technology in the future. Although we can all experience the benefits of 5G in our daily lives, if we do not control it, the situation of exceeding the resource allocation expenditure will still occur.

Developing 5G requires good methods

Therefore, Wu Feng suggested that: 5G should be developed, but a set of high-density, low-cost and highly reliable energy storage technologies should also be found. On the one hand, the stability of 5G base stations should not be unavailable due to energy shortages. On the other hand, excessive investment in 5G should not lead to unexpected conditions in the country's power operation. The key is to find a balance between the two. In fact, regarding Wu Feng's suggestions, elites in my country's 5G industry have already explored for many years, and have gradually found some feasible solutions to optimize 5G technology. Among them, Huang Yuhong, deputy director of China Mobile Research Institute, spoke extensively at the forum to explain his important reform theory.

According to Huang Yuhong's suggestion, the construction of 5G base stations in the future can adopt the optimization measures of "four new + two transformations".

New in architecture, new in function, new in materials and new in energy. For example, in network architecture, we can completely change the traditional concept of base station construction and adopt centralized deployment to reduce dependence on the computer room. The computer room determines the power consumption, so we can also save a certain amount of electricity. Another example is new materials. Gallium nitride is now widely used in the construction of 5G base stations. In the future, we may also use graphene to dissipate heat, which is both an optimization of the base station and a reduction of energy consumption.

The two are intelligence and collaboration. Most of the current 5G base stations are maintained and repaired manually, and the process is just like traditional wiring, which is complicated and very dangerous. What if we can introduce artificial intelligence technology? That will greatly improve the network effect and connect the terminal, base station, and network into a unified intelligent entity, which will naturally reduce energy consumption and mitigate the risk of equipment operation.