Sun Songlin of Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications: Facing the 5G dilemma and breaking through from the industry

At the 2021 China (Shenzhen) 5G Industry Summit, Sun Songlin, professor and doctoral supervisor at Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, delivered a speech, saying that my country's 5G industry has made rapid progress, but it also faces many difficulties. We need to face the difficulties head-on, and industrial applications are the key to breaking the deadlock.

By the end of last year, my country had opened 718,000 5G base stations, accounting for 70% of the world's total. This year, the number will reach more than 1 million, and the scale will continue to expand. At the same time, 5G has encountered difficulties in three aspects: funding, energy consumption, and application.

• First, the capital investment is large, and the subsequent operating costs are extremely high;
• Second, the power consumption is high. The power consumption of 5G base stations is 1.5 to 3 times that of 4G base stations, and the high construction density leads to huge overall energy consumption;
• The third is the lack of unique applications. When 5G licenses were issued in 2019, the industry expected the "main battlefield" to be the industrial Internet and the Internet of Things, but now it is not mature enough and has shifted to the consumer Internet.

Sun Songlin analyzed the three major issues one by one.

• First, the three major operators have invested more than 900 billion yuan in 4G, but have not yet recovered their costs. They have invested more than 260 billion yuan in 5G so far, and I am afraid that they will not be able to recover their costs, including the subsequent operating costs. We should see that 5G, as the information infrastructure of the "new infrastructure", is the infrastructure of the "new infrastructure", which has a certain long-term and public welfare nature, and its value consideration should not be limited to the return on investment in the communications industry.
• Second, as a new technology, 5G will inevitably have its transition period, maturity period, decline period, and extinction period. When the latest communication technology is commercialized, power consumption is always the first priority. The maturity of the technology needs time to be polished and needs to be gradually improved through user feedback.
• The third is the life cycle of industrialization. Huawei founder Ren Zhengfei once said that it would take 7 years for 5G to mature. In overseas countries, 3G and 4G have similar patterns. Domestic 4G caught up with the "double innovation", and a large amount of private capital was invested in the mobile Internet, which accelerated the maturity of 4G, which took only 3 years. For 5G to mature, the industry must extend the time dimension.

Understanding the current difficulties faced by 5G development, how can the industry break through? Sun Songlin pointed out that looking back at the history of mobile communication development, 1G and 2G solved the problem of mobile calls, and 3G and 4G solved the problem of mobile Internet access. Each single-digit generation is an epoch-making change. The 5G era will usher in a new historical mission, empowering all walks of life, from serving people to serving more "things".

In the 3G era, the operators initially advertised video calls, but in fact, the first popular service was Weibo, which made full use of people's fragmented time. Entering the 4G era, the mobile Internet wave has completely subverted people's lifestyles. 5G is integrating with new technologies such as artificial intelligence, big data, and blockchain. Its subversive impact on the industry will be far greater than that of 4G on consumption. The industrial Internet will inevitably become the network with the greatest value in the future.

Sun Songlin cited two examples of 5G-enabled industries:

• First, the big video industry. Short videos have become mainstream business in the 4G era, and will continue in the 5G era. 4G networks will be an important supplement to 5G. The value of 5G lies in ultra-high-definition video, such as live broadcasts, with uplink rates exceeding 20Mbps; low-latency video types such as naked-eye immersive video, VR/AR; and interactive, cloud games, and other video types that have very high bandwidth requirements.
• The second is the industrial Internet. The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology has previously released the 2.0 version of the industrial Internet, which divides the network-enabled industrial Internet into four levels. However, Sun Songlin believes that the industrial Internet protocol is like the "Eight-Nation Alliance", and the intervention of 5G technology is very difficult and requires a long-term running-in process. 5G can quickly intervene in the enterprise layer, such as building a 5G enterprise private network. In 2020, Germany and Japan successively built 5G enterprise private networks, and China is still conducting pilot projects. "This is the best entry point for 5G." Sun Songlin pointed out.

China is currently building 5G networks on a large scale, far ahead of the world, and there are many doubts in the industry. Sun Songlin expressed his own views on this: the same technology, different deployments will have different effects. In the 4G era, China's mobile Internet applications ranked first in the world. It is said that 4G has detonated the mobile Internet, but the United States, Europe, Japan and other countries and regions deployed earlier, but they are not as prosperous as China. To be precise, it was the large-scale and wide-coverage 4G that detonated the mobile Internet. 5G must be deployed on a large scale and with wide coverage from the beginning, and the same logic applies. In the long-term integration process with the industry, new business forms will be generated, promoting industrial upgrading and digital transformation.