China has 600,000 5G base stations. Why should 5G investment be moderately ahead of schedule?

In the popular movie "My Hometown and Me" during the National Day holiday, a 5G base station standing in the middle of a farmland demonstrated China's enthusiasm for 5G construction. Before the National Day, China had 600,000 5G base stations.

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However, there are also different opinions about 5G applications and 5G technology. For example, some people recently believe that 5G is expensive, technically immature, and has no application scenarios, and that 5G investment has been over-advanced.

Indeed, compared with the 3G and 4G eras, China has taken the lead for the first time in the 5G era: it is in the first wave in terms of license issuance; in terms of technology, China's 5G standard essential patents rank first in the world; in terms of terminals, China's 5G mobile phone production is far ahead; China also has a relatively complete communications industry chain.

Leading in the industry has also allowed China to enter the "frontier zone" of innovation, where it needs to continuously overcome issues such as technology, application, and cost. For example, China is the first country in the world to prepare to build a nationwide 5G independent network, and there is no successful experience to learn from.

It will take time for 5G technology to mature, and China must be at the forefront of innovation. The international standards organization 3GPP has released two 5G standard versions, R15 and R16. The standards for low-latency and high-reliability application scenarios such as the industrial Internet and the Internet of Vehicles were just completed at the end of June this year. The third version of the standard (R17) for large-scale machine-type communication scenarios with large connections and low power consumption is expected to be completed by the end of 2021, and the maturity of related equipment products will take even longer.

In terms of applications, ultra-high-definition live broadcast, cloud gaming, virtual reality and other applications have taken shape. A series of industry applications such as 5G mining, 5G ports, and 5G+Industrial Internet are being implemented, and hundreds of application scenarios are being explored. However, profitable 5G killer applications have not yet appeared.

Telecommunications industry experts said that China's current 5G application exploration has entered the "innovation frontier zone", especially for enterprises and governments, there is no ready-made experience to follow, and it requires greater trial and error costs than in the 3G/4G era.

Despite this, China still needs to make a moderately advanced layout for 5G. The emergence of killer applications depends on the network first. The emergence of 3G has brought mobile e-commerce and social applications to the fore, and 4G has inspired mobile payments and short videos. These "killer" personal user businesses basically appeared 2-3 years after the network was commercialized.

5G plays a huge role as an engine for the economy. Shi Wei, former director of the Industry Office of the Institute of Economic System and Management of the National Development and Reform Commission, believes that 5G, as an underlying transmission network, needs to be integrated with technologies such as big data, artificial intelligence, and the Internet of Things to produce revolutionary changes in computing, such as edge computing and network slicing, so as to help all walks of life transform into intelligent ones, which also requires the network to come first.

Telecommunications industry expert Chen Zhigang said that moderate advance investment in 5G is of great significance for increasing the scale of ICT (information and communication technology) capital and continuing to expand the proportion of digital economy in GDP.

It has become a consensus to plan ahead for 5G. According to data from the Global Mobile Suppliers Association, as of mid-September, 101 operators around the world have launched one or more 5G commercial services that comply with 3GPP standards in 44 countries or regions.

The maturity of 5G technology products has its own objective laws. Liu Liehong, Vice Minister of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology of China, said that from the perspective of the relationship between networks and applications, a moderately advanced network is the basis for the development of applications. In the next three years, 5G will still be in the "introduction stage." (End)