Hundreds of millions of "5G users" have subscribed to packages but have not yet accessed the Internet

The penetration rates of 5G packages for China Telecom, China Mobile and China Unicom are 31.2%, 29.7% and 20% respectively. China Mobile still needs to catch up in terms of penetration rate due to its large user base. In terms of infrastructure, the total number of 5G base stations is 819,000, of which 48,000 were newly built from January to March.

From the user data, the number of 5G package users of the three major operators were 189 million, 111 million and 91.85 million respectively, with the number of 5G package users exceeding 390 million. At the same time, with the growth of 5G package users, the monthly rental fees of users increased significantly. China Mobile's ARPU (average revenue per user) reached (average monthly consumption per capita) 47.4 yuan, a year-on-year increase of 0.9%, China Telecom's ARPU was 45.6 yuan, and China Unicom's ARPU was 44.6 yuan.

However, data from the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology showed that as of the end of March, the number of 5G mobile terminal user connections of the three major operators reached 285 million, a net increase of 86.84 million from the end of last year, accounting for 17.8% of mobile phone users.

The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology gave 285 million 5G users, while the operators said there were 390 million 5G users. What's the difference of 100 million users? It turns out that the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology counts the number of users accessing the 5G network, while the operators count the number of users with 5G packages. However, more than 100 million users of 5G packages have switched from 4G phones to 5G packages, so they are not actually 5G users.