The 5G revolution started ten years ago

Will the "Warring States Period" pattern established by 3G be rewritten by 5G?

The news of the cooperation between China Radio and Television and State Grid on 5G quickly fermented in just a few days. Various analyses and comments ultimately pointed to two words that are both recognized and full of unknowns and variables: change.

Why is the word "change" used to define 5G? Why not "revolution"?

Because the mobile communications revolution began the moment China issued 3G licenses ten years ago.

Recently, with China Telecom ending CDMA and China Mobile 3G having already quietly ended its mission, "China Unicom 3G network withdrawal" has been constantly speculated by various media.

Although WCDMA was once the main force of China Unicom's 3G voice (including HD voice) and data services, and is still playing a role in the current 4G life cycle and the early stage of 5G, many China Unicom users have begun to frequently receive 10010 text messages inviting them to upgrade to VoLTE without changing the tariff standards.

Under the general trend, the gradual withdrawal of 2G/3G can make its frequency resources play a more important role in 5G.

With 5G in front of us, many industries are waiting to be developed. So how much inspiration will the great revolution in mobile communication operations and experience that started with 3G ten years ago bring to 5G?

01. Will the “Warring States Period” pattern established by 3G be rewritten by 5G?

The third telecom restructuring in 2008 officially led to a three-way competition in the domestic telecom industry: China Telecom acquired China Unicom's CDMA network for RMB 110 billion, China Satellite Communications' basic telecom business was merged into China Telecom, China Unicom merged with China Netcom, and China Railway Communications merged into China Mobile. The three operators have since obtained full-service licenses and started to compete in fixed-line broadband, mobile services, and enterprise services.

However, the allocation of licenses for the three 3G technologies by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology in January 2009 was also mixed with some checks and balances: the independently innovated but still weak TD-SCDMA license was issued to China Mobile, while China Unicom and China Telecom received WCDMA and cdma2000 licenses, in an attempt to curb China Mobile's momentum of "dominant and wild growth".

Before the issuance of 3G licenses, 91 countries around the world had deployed 211 WCDMA networks and hundreds of terminal models.

When the WCDMA equipment bidding was launched in November 2008, China Unicom directly adopted the highest version of WCDMA at that time, R6, in large cities, with a network downlink speed of 14.4Mbps (yes, this was a high rate at the time) and an uplink speed of 5.76Mbps, while a relatively low-end technology version was adopted in small and medium-sized cities. After further upgrading to HSDPA, the service quality improved rapidly, and a large number of China Mobile users also began to "hold two mobile phones in their hands, use the mobile phone to answer calls, and use the Unicom phone to surf the Internet".

Based on the mature WCDMA industry chain resources, 3G became the era of China Unicom's most rapid and invincible development. According to a statistical data at that time, in 2009, when 3G was just launched commercially, China Mobile had 522 million users, accounting for 72% of the country's 725 million mobile users, followed by China Unicom, accounting for 20%, and China Telecom, which had just started operating the CDMA network, accounting for 8%.

Two years later, in November 2011, according to statistics from the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, China Mobile, China Unicom and China Telecom had 48.007 million, 36.534 million and 33.35 million 3G users respectively. China Mobile still has an advantage in the overall 3G market, but its growth is already very weak (and the utilization rate of China Mobile's 3G network is only 30%).

In addition, after China Telecom obtained the CDMA2000 license, it directly built an EV-DO network in the 800MHz frequency band, and built a 3G network covering the whole country in a short period of time. It also put a lot of effort into building the terminal industry chain, which made the situation of China Mobile's monopoly in the 2G era completely evolve into a stalemate competition situation.

But it was precisely these impressive performances that made China Unicom relax its vigilance. When it loudly announced its 3G commercial "achievements" and was obsessed with speeding up its 3G network, global 4G quietly arrived, and China Mobile early on deployed LTE in an effort to rewrite its embarrassment in the 3G era.

The embarrassment comes from the fact that from the issuance of 3G licenses in January 2009 to the issuance of 4G licenses in December 2013, China Mobile invested a total of 500,000 sites involving 188 billion yuan, plus tens of billions of subsidies on terminals, but in return it only got the reality of low speed, many blind spots, and weak terminals and applications.

For this reason, many media and industry insiders have questioned why China spent a lot of money to develop TD-SCDMA, a technology with independent intellectual property rights, and forced China Mobile to "operate" in this weak industry. Reports such as "The Tragedy of China's Standard TD-SCDMA: 200 Billion Investment Wasted" have been widely reprinted. However, as China surpassed 4G and took the lead in 5G, the industry gradually realized that although TD-SCDMA did not achieve great success in network applications, it achieved a revolutionary breakthrough in independent standards.

This technology, which has changed China's discourse power in the history of international mobile communications development, was proposed by the Chinese communications industry in 1998. At that time, the domestic communications industry was almost blank in terms of technology, system, terminal and chip. As a predecessor said, the decision to "create its own standard" should have an absolutely positive effect on the domestic communications industry. Although no one made money from this industry, the experience accumulated from this standard, the participation of the industry chain, especially domestic manufacturers, played an immeasurable role in China's discourse power in TDD technology and even 5G.

Since the country decided to develop TD-SCDMA in 2005, in addition to the "mainstream players" such as Huawei, ZTE, Datang Mobile, Nokia and other manufacturers that have participated in the industry construction, equipment and chip companies such as TD Tech, Alcatel, Spreadtrum, T3G, Chongqing Post Ankai, ADI and terminals and test instruments such as Hisense, Amoi, Zhongyou, Zhongchuang Xince, and 41st Institute have also benefited from the development of TD-SCDMA and boarded the "express train" of mobile communications.

After the construction of 3G and the refinement of 4G, 5G has brought new players, including radio and television and State Grid. Many large international companies have begun to build their own 5G networks. Will the three-legged situation be rewritten under the great changes?

It's hard to say no.

The development of terminals and applications is even more difficult to separate from the smart large-screen + APP revolution that began 10 years ago.

02. 10-year revolution in terminals and experience

At the end of 2019, as 5G chips from several chip companies came out, a number of new 5G mobile phones were eager to take their place in the 2020 New Year season.

Can the iPhone, which revolutionized the terminal experience since the 3G era, rewrite its glory? How will Huawei, Samsung, Xiaomi, and V/O, which have experienced ups and downs in the 4G era, compete? Will Nokia and Motorola, which have disappeared, rise again?

In addition to many industry applications such as driverless cars, telemedicine/education, etc., what will be the killer application of 5G for consumers?

No one has yet given a definite answer.

If we were to ask which mobile phone was the most revolutionary in 3G, it would undoubtedly be Apple's iPhone. In 2007, Steve Jobs released the first generation of iPhone in Silicon Valley, California, opening the curtain of a huge change in mobile phones. A year later, Steve Jobs launched the first iPhone model that supported third-party applications (installation), the iPhone 3G, which laid the platform foundation for the explosive growth of Apple mobile phones in the next decade and also opened the curtain of the era of smart large-screen mobile phones + APPs.

The iPhone, which became a huge hit as soon as it was released, ranked third in the global smartphone market share (5.3%), with the top two being the "2G leader" Nokia (45.2%) and BlackBerry (13.4%). (Gartner data)

Most consumers who own feature phones are full of curiosity and anticipation for services such as mobile Internet access, video calls, online music and games brought by 3G.

In a November 2008 issue of the Oriental Morning Post, a report about China Unicom said: "Yesterday China Unicom brought a variety of 3G application services to the Shanghai Industrial Expo. Among them, mobile TV, Internet cards, mobile music, and mobile Internet are known as the four most profitable 3G services. At the same time, China Unicom exhibited 20 WCDMA terminals from six major brands, including Nokia, Motorola, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, Huawei, and LG. These brands are the world's mainstream suppliers of WCDMA mobile phones."

Although the experience of mobile 3G users is rather "frustrating" (when TD-SCDMA was trial-commercialized in April 2008, there were only 8 terminals launched on the market and only a handful of terminal manufacturers), by 2011, the cumulative number of TD-SCDMA terminals connected to the network had reached hundreds. However, the most fashionable and powerful 3G terminals are still in the WCDMA world, including the iPhone, which later entered China and first cooperated with China Unicom.

As for China Telecom, a "new player in mobile communications", after launching the "Tianyi 3G" brand, it began to widely cooperate with mobile phone manufacturers to build the Tianyi industrial chain. As of 2011, its cumulative sales exceeded 10 million units, and in September of that year it created a new sales record of 2 million units.

It was also starting with Tianyi that, thanks to the strong push by operators and mobile phone manufacturers, "large-screen" and "thousand-yuan" 3G smartphones became popular, and 2G feature phones began to be rapidly eliminated.

It can be said that in the 3G era, smart screens and APPs have reshaped the mobile communications industry chain, with various roles joining in, including business providers, business developers, software developers, content developers, content providers, service providers and after-sales service.

It was also from this time that Internet companies came in with apps that provided good user experience and convenient payment. Weibo and WeChat, which had been developing rapidly since the 3G era, completely replaced the operators' text messages and their attempts at "Fetion" on the mobile Internet. The rise of mobile payments, video apps, and online games in the 4G era forced operators with large scale and inflexible steps to fall into the "pipeline role."

In the 5G era, can operators still play a leading role in various industries by leveraging 5G+?

Obviously, this is what the operators expect, otherwise the three operators would not have launched the "5G+" brand in a high-profile manner when the 5G licenses were issued, directly pointing to cooperation with various industries. China Mobile also recently released the 5G+ Industrial Internet White Paper, planning to create 100 5G application scenarios and launch 100 5G demonstration projects for 14 key industries such as industrial Internet and smart energy.

However, the reality is cruel. Operators who have been frequently squeezed out of the toC market by Internet companies still face considerable challenges in conquering the toB market. In the "Innovative Application Cases of Industrial Internet in 2019" recently published by the National Industrial Information Security Development Research Center, among the 35 typical application cases of industrial Internet platforms and 10 cross-industry and cross-field platform application cases, only one case involves the combination with 5G.

It is the operators' wish to create "5G+Industrial Internet", but in the eyes of industries and large enterprises, "Industrial Internet+5G" seems to be becoming a trend. It is unclear who is the protagonist and who is the supporting role of 5G+.

With China Radio and Television and State Grid entering the 5G market, the industry is also watching whether it will cause major changes in the telecom operator landscape.

As an expert from Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications predicted, the cooperation between China Radio, Television and State Grid does not rule out the feasibility of accelerating the merger of China Unicom and China Telecom. If China Telecom and Unicom merge, and with the cooperation between China Radio, Television and State Grid, China Mobile will suffer a huge impact in the mobile market and talent pool.

But everything remains to be confirmed.

Since 3G, 5G is no longer a brand new beginning. It not only tests the technical capabilities and market resources of the industrial chain, but also tests the accumulated experience and overall perspective of all parties involved.