Saving 5G, starting with removing the pull-down 5G switch?

Recently, many users have found that the 5G signal shortcut switch in their mobile phones has disappeared. In response, Li Xiaolong, president of Huawei's terminal product line, explained on the social media platform that removing the 5G pull-down shortcut switch is a unified requirement of China's three major operators, because the operators found that many users bought 5G mobile phones but turned off the 5G switch when using them.

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Not only Huawei phones have cancelled the 5G pull-down shortcut switch, but all other phones sold in the market, such as Xiaomi, OPPO, and vivo, no longer have 5G shortcut switches. Apparently, what Huawei said about the operator's requirements is basically true.

So the question arises, why do many consumers still turn off 5G networks to use them even if they have purchased 5G phones?

The problem lies with 5G itself. For consumers, the biggest convenience brought by 5G networks is the increase in network speed. But other than that, the other experiences are almost the same as 4G. Not only that, after turning on 5G, for many users, it even generates a negative feedback.

For example, the power consumption of mobile phones has increased, causing the phones to heat up severely. Of course, this is mainly caused by large bandwidth and multiple channels. In short, the communication pipeline has become thicker and the water pipes have become more numerous, resulting in a significant increase in power consumption.

There are also problems with the network itself. Since the coverage of 5G network itself is not yet perfect, you may face the problem of network disconnection during use. In some scenarios, once the 5G signal is weak, the frequency of switching between different systems will increase. Coupled with the imperfect algorithm, the device may be directly disconnected from the network, and it is necessary to switch the network again to connect.

At the same time, the surge in power consumption brought about by 5G is not only for users' mobile devices, but also for base stations. According to public data statistics, the current power consumption of 5G base stations is about 3500W to 5000W. Based on the industrial electricity price of 0.5 yuan per kWh, the annual photovoltaic fee for each 5G base station will range from 15,330 yuan to 21,900 yuan, not to mention the current plan to increase electricity prices, which means that the annual electricity bill for a single base station will be more than 50,000 yuan in the future.

According to statistics, by the end of 2020, there will be more than 718,000 5G base stations in operation, and in 2021, my country will build more than 600,000 new 5G base stations.

Based on 1.3 million 5G base stations, it means that in the future operators will need to spend 65 billion yuan on electricity bills alone, not to mention the annual operation and maintenance costs of 5G base stations, as well as the construction costs of 5G base stations.

Therefore, many 5G base stations have adopted the intelligent base station mode, and some dynamically adjust the operating status according to the number of users. When there are too few or no users connected to the base station, the base station will automatically reduce power consumption or shut down. When a user connects, it will automatically turn on, which can minimize power consumption.

Even the three major operators with deep pockets cannot afford such high costs without income. How to increase revenue and get more users to use 5G networks is the most important part.

According to data recently released by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, as of July this year, the number of 5G mobile terminal connections reached 392 million, a net increase of 193 million from the end of last year, with a growth rate of nearly 100%.

But even so, operators still require mobile phone manufacturers to remove the 5G shortcut switch in the drop-down menu. The reason is that many users buy 5G phones but turn off 5G. This has led to an increase in 5G users, but has not actually brought more revenue to operators.

At the same time, ten departments including the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, the Office of the Central Cyberspace Affairs Commission, the National Development and Reform Commission, the Ministry of Education, the Ministry of Finance, the Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development, the Ministry of Culture and Tourism, the National Health Commission, the State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission of the State Council, and the National Energy Administration recently jointly issued the "5G Application "Sailing" Action Plan (2021-2023)", which has quantitative requirements for the coverage of 5G terminal users. Therefore, operators have to do their best to increase users' 5G usage.

The cancellation of the pull-down 5G quick switch on mobile phones is obviously an operation taken by operators to cultivate users' habit of using 5G, but this method of increasing the cost of changes is only a temporary solution and not a fundamental solution.

If we want to completely change the current situation of low 5G usage, we can only start from the application scenarios. However, with the popularization of Wi-Fi, the scenario where cellular networks can be used is basically outdoors without Wi-Fi. However, the problem is that consumers have developed the habit of not using high-traffic applications in outdoor scenarios without Wi-Fi, which weakens the only high-speed advantage of 5G.

Only by launching 5G killer applications can this situation be completely changed. However, it has been several years since 5G was promoted, and the market is still in the process of discussing 5G applications, which only proves that 5G's exclusive application scenarios are either relatively niche or difficult to find, which is a brand new challenge for the past cellular network technology.