At the recently concluded MWC 2018, 5G became a hot topic around the world, and domestic attention to 5G was also unusually high. In fact, compared with 2G, 3G, and 4G, my country's 5G layout is no later than other countries; and China's three major operators play a crucial role in China's 5G development, so their rhythm on 5G is basically the same. This determines the pace of 5G in China as a whole.
At present, it seems that the initial implementation of 5G in China has basically been locked in 2019.
China Mobile
According to Lei Feng.com, among the three operators, China Mobile is the fastest moving.
In June 2017, China Mobile and ZTE opened the country’s first 5G pre-commercial test base station in Guangzhou.
In November of that year, China Mobile, Qualcomm and ZTE announced that they had successfully implemented the world's first end-to-end 5G New Radio (5G NR) system interoperability (IoDT) based on the 3GPP R15 standard; representatives of the three companies respectively Including operators, system providers and terminal vendors, they form a complete 5G interoperability link, which means a milestone in China's 5G trial process.
Later at MWC 2018, China Mobile made even more moves:
At the level of results release, in addition to releasing the largest-scale end-to-end interoperability results based on 3GPP standards (involving base stations, terminal chips and test instruments and other links), China Mobile also released 5G commercial product prototypes and test results, and clarified the "End-to-end Technical Requirements for 5G Scale Tests."
At the level of trial plans, China Mobile announced that it will build the world's largest 5G trial network and officially announced the 2018 5G large-scale trial plan - it will be deployed in Hangzhou, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Suzhou, and Wuhan in 5 Field tests will be carried out in 12 cities, and each city will build more than 100 5G base stations; 5G services and Application demonstration.
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 Qualcomm, Huawei, MediaTek, Unisoc, Intel, Samsung and other 6 There are 10 mainstream chip companies including Huawei, OPPO, vivo, Xiaomi, Samsung, ZTE, Lenovo, HTC, Hisense and TCL, and 4 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 the first batch of 5G pre-commercial terminals in the first half of 2019, including data terminals, smartphones, etc. product.
It can be said that whether it is plans or results, China Mobile's 5G commercial pace is quite tight and the timetable is quite clear.
China Unicom
At the new product launch conference for government and enterprise customers on March 9, China Unicom released cloud networking, cloud networking, Seven new products including networking and cloud broadband, and took the opportunity to announce its own 5G plan schedule. China Unicom stated that it will conduct 5G networking trials in 2018, pre-commercial use in 2019, and official commercial use in 2020.
This is the most accurate timetable released by China Unicom for 5G so far.
In fact, at China Unicom’s first extraordinary shareholders’ meeting in early February, China Unicom Chairman Wang Xiaochu specifically talked about 5G. He said:
The news from chip manufacturers is that in 2019 5G technology will be available in the first quarter of this year, 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 have actively followed up and done some experiments. The conclusion is that manufacturers and R&D institutions need to be given some time to think clearly about technology and business models. International companies and Chinese companies must be much more cautious and formulate investments and applications based on business models. point.
From here we can see that China Unicom is taking a much more cautious approach to 5G.
However, China Unicom has also made moves in terms of 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 Xiongan.
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 laboratory verification of Huawei, ZTE and Nokia’s 5G prototypes and some field performance verification had also been completed.
However, compared to China Mobile, China Unicom’s pace is still much slower. At MWC 2018, China Unicom, ZTE and Intel held a press conference to jointly release the "China Unicom Edge-Cloud Platform Architecture and Industrial 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 can be considered part of China Unicom's overall trend in the 5G era, it still focuses on cloud services and is still a bit far away from ordinary users. In terms of terminals, which are most closely related to 5G commercial use, China Unicom has basically made no movement.
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 the construction of a 5G innovation demonstration network in Xiong County, Xiongan New District, 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 the 5G innovation demonstration network as an opportunity to 5G will be put into trial commercial use in 2019 and will be put into large-scale commercial use in key cities in 2020.
In the following months, China Telecom successively launched 5G pilot projects in six cities including Xiongan, Shenzhen, Shanghai, Suzhou, Chengdu, and Lanzhou, with 6-8 stations in each city, mainly in the 3.5GHz wireless band. Networking capabilities and solution verification. The entire opening process was completed in early December 2017.
In January 2018, at the press conference on China’s 5G three-phase test specifications, 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 (enhanced mobile broadband), gives priority to SA (Standalone) independent networking, and will support full-mode, full-frequency, and full Netcom.
However, Lei Feng.com observed that China Telecom did not take many actions at MWC 2018. At the meeting, it and Huawei jointly announced the establishment of a commercial joint innovation center. The cooperation direction focuses on video, Tianyi Cloud and all-optical networks, and is not closely related to 5G itself.
5G is coming, and 6G has also started
In summary, China’s three major operators have their own rhythms in 5G deployment, while China Mobile has continued its 4G deployment The first move of the times. However, overall, under the policy background of the country vigorously promoting the development of 5G, the three major operators will not be too far apart on the road to 5G commercialization. The general timeline is relatively consistent: all are expected to be in 2019. Commercial use, officially launched in 2020.
Finally, there is another question worthy of concern: Since 5G is already expected, what about 6G? According to Miao Wei, Minister of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, in an interview with CCTV News on March 9, at the end of the year and the beginning of the year, our country Research work on 6G has already started.