5G is coming soon. Will it save you money? Operators: Stop dreaming!

According to national planning, 5G will be put into trial commercial use in more than 20 cities across the country in 2019, and will be officially put into commercial use in 2020. There are three main benefits of 5G:

• The first is higher Internet speed (eMBB). Theoretically, the speed can reach several Gbps, but in actual application, it is expected to be between 200-500Mbps, because too fast is meaningless for ordinary users, and only in special application environments can it be faster.
• Second, high reliability and lower latency (URLLC). 5G's 1 millisecond latency is significantly lower than 4G's 20-60 milliseconds, which can support demanding applications such as driverless cars and artificial intelligence.
• The third is larger-scale connectivity (mMtc). It can support hundreds of millions of IoT devices, and in the future, there will probably be sensors everywhere around you.

The latter two benefits are mainly for industrial and socio-economic development, while the first benefit is something that ordinary people can directly feel. So the question is, can we save more money by using 5G?

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In fact, saving money is a relative concept. For example, in the 5G era, if your usual usage habits, such as browsing Weibo and WeChat, watching short videos, browsing news, playing games, etc., do not change much, then the traffic used will not increase too much. As the tariffs continue to decline, it will definitely save you money, especially if you used to consume more, the more you will save. And if 5G brings new applications, such as VR\AR, which require more traffic, and your monthly traffic consumption increases by several times or even dozens of times, then the total expenditure will definitely be more. Moreover, the construction of 5G requires trillions of funds. China Mobile, China Telecom and China Unicom will definitely lose money in the early stage of 5G, so the price cannot be very, very low. After a few years, when the user scale increases and the operating costs come down, it will be cheaper. Eventually, the national maximum traffic within 50 yuan a month (unlimited speed within 200GB) will become a reality.