The 5G timetable of the three major operators is determined: it is not too late to change your mobile phone in 2019

At the recently concluded MWC 2018, 5G became a hot topic around the world, and the attention paid to 5G in China was also unusually high. In fact, compared with 2G, 3G, and 4G, my country's 5G layout is not later than other countries; and China's three major operators play a vital role in China's 5G development, so their pace in 5G basically determines the pace of China's 5G development.

At present, it seems that the initial implementation of 5G in China has basically been locked in 2019.

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China Mobile

In the view of Leifeng.com, among the three operators, China Mobile is the fastest.

In June 2017, China Mobile and ZTE launched the country's first 5G pre-commercial test base station in Guangzhou.

In November of that year, China Mobile, Qualcomm and ZTE jointly announced that they had successfully achieved the world's first end-to-end 5G New Radio (5G NR) system interoperability (IoDT) based on the 3GPP R15 standard; the three companies represented operators, system providers and terminal vendors, respectively, and they formed a complete 5G interoperability link, which meant a milestone in China's 5G trial process.

Later at MWC 2018, China Mobile made frequent moves:

• In terms of results release, in addition to releasing the above-mentioned largest-scale end-to-end interoperability results based on 3GPP standards (involving 9 manufacturers in base stations, terminal chips, test instruments, etc.), China Mobile also released 5G commercial product prototypes and test results, and clarified the "5G Large-Scale Trial End-to-End Technical Requirements".
• At the test plan level, China Mobile announced that it will build the world's largest 5G test network and officially announced the 2018 5G large-scale test plan - field tests will be carried out in five cities, including Hangzhou, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Suzhou and Wuhan, and more than 100 5G base stations will be built in each city; 5G business and application demonstrations will be carried out in 12 cities including Beijing, Xiongan, Tianjin, Fuzhou, Chongqing, Chengdu, Nanchang, Nanning, Shenzhen, Zhengzhou, Shenyang and Lanzhou.
• At the terminal level, China Mobile has jointly launched the [5G Terminal Pioneer Plan] with 20 terminal industry partners around the world. These 20 companies include six mainstream chip companies, including Qualcomm, Huawei, MediaTek, Unisoc, Intel, and Samsung; 10 mainstream terminal companies, including Huawei, OPPO, vivo, Xiaomi, Samsung, ZTE, Lenovo, HTC, Hisense, and TCL; and four component companies, including Qorvo, Skyworks, Taiyo Yuden, and Feixiang Technology.
• In addition, China Mobile also stated that it will launch the first batch of 5G chips that meet China Mobile's needs before the end of 2018, and release the first batch of 5G pre-commercial terminals in the first half of 2019, including data terminals, smartphones and other products.

It can be said that China Mobile's 5G commercialization pace is quite tight and the timetable is quite clear, both in terms of plans and results.

China Unicom

At the new product launch conference for government and enterprise customers on March 9, China Unicom launched seven new products, including cloud networking, cloud networking, and cloud broadband, with the theme of "Cloud-network integration, intelligent future leadership", and took the opportunity to announce its own 5G plan timetable. China Unicom said that it will conduct 5G network trials in 2018, pre-commercial use in 2019, and official commercial use in 2020.

This is the most accurate timetable China Unicom has released for 5G so far.

In fact, at China Unicom’s first interim shareholders’ meeting in early February, China Unicom Chairman Wang Xiaochu specifically talked about 5G. He said:

According to chip manufacturers, 5G technology will be available in the first quarter of 2019, but it is estimated that the technology will mature about a quarter later, and 5G services may not be available until the second half of 2019. We are actively tracking and have done some experiments. The conclusion is that we need to give manufacturers and R&D institutions some time to think clearly about the technology and business model. Both international and Chinese companies should be much more cautious and set investment and application points based on the business model.

From this we can see that China Unicom is taking much more cautious steps in 5G.

However, China Unicom has also taken action in 5G trials. In January 2018, China Unicom submitted an application to the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, planning to conduct 5G trials in seven cities: Beijing, Tianjin, Shanghai, Shenzhen, Hangzhou, Nanjing, and Xiong'an.

At that time, Ma Hongbing, deputy general manager of China Unicom's Network Construction Department, revealed that field construction work had been completed in Shanghai and Shenzhen, and the laboratory verification of 5G prototypes of Huawei, ZTE and Nokia and some field performance verification had also been completed.

However, compared with China Mobile, China Unicom's pace is still much slower. At MWC 2018, China Unicom, together with ZTE and Intel, held a press conference and jointly released the "China Unicom Edge-Cloud Platform Architecture and Industry Ecosystem White Paper", and announced the official launch of China Unicom's Edge-Cloud large-scale pilot.

Leifeng.com believes that although the above actions are part of China Unicom's overall trend in the 5G era, it still focuses on cloud services and is still a bit far from ordinary users. As for terminals, which are most closely related to 5G commercial use, China Unicom has basically made no moves.

China Telecom

Like China Mobile and China Unicom, China Telecom has already conducted pilot work in some cities.

In August 2017, China Telecom announced the launch of 5G innovation demonstration network construction in Xiong County, Xiongan New Area, Hebei Province. At the same time, it released the "China Telecom 5G Innovation Demonstration Network White Paper" and stated that it would take the construction of 5G innovation demonstration network as an opportunity to realize 5G trial commercial use in 2019 and large-scale commercial use in key cities in 2020.

In the following months, China Telecom launched 5G pilots in six cities, including Xiong'an, Shenzhen, Shanghai, Suzhou, Chengdu, and Lanzhou, with 6-8 stations in each city, mainly verifying the wireless networking capabilities and solutions in the 3.5GHz frequency band. The entire launch process was completed in early December 2017.

In January 2018, at the China 5G Phase III Test Specification Release Conference, Shen Shaoai, Deputy General Manager of China Telecom's Technology Department, clearly stated China Telecom's network construction ideas, which is to first focus on eMBB (Enhance Mobile Broadband), give priority to SA (Standalone) independent networking, and support full-mode, full-frequency and full-network access.

However, Leifeng.com observed that China Telecom did not make many moves at MWC 2018. At the conference, it and Huawei jointly announced the establishment of a commercial joint innovation center, with the cooperation focusing on video, Tianyi Cloud and all-optical network, and not closely related to 5G itself.

5G is coming, and 6G is also launched

In summary, China's three major operators have their own pace in 5G deployment, and China Mobile has continued its preemptive action in the 4G era. However, in general, under the policy background of the country's vigorous promotion of 5G development, the three major operators will not be too far apart on the road to 5G commercialization, and the general timeline is relatively consistent: pre-commercialization in 2019 and official commercialization in 2020.

Finally, there is one more question worth paying attention to: since 5G is already expected, what about 6G? According to Miao Wei, Minister of Industry and Information Technology, in an interview with CCTV News on March 9, my country's research on 6G has already started at the end of the year and the beginning of the next year.