China will get 5G in 2020, say the people who delayed China’s 4G launch

China’s 4G market is growing like a weed. China Mobile, which operates the company’s biggest 4G network, expects to have 500 million 4G users by year’s end. But 4G is old – 4G LTE tech has been around since 2009. When is China getting a next generation – 5G – mobile network?

According to China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT), 5G will be commercially available in China in 2020.

Research on 5G technology is long since underway, of course, but the speed it progresses at isn’t likely to matter much. Chinese authorities control when new telecom networks can be rolled out, and if 5G is anything like 4G, the process could be painfully slow. China didn’t get commercially-available 4G service until very late 2013, years after the tech had been rolled out by telecoms in neighboring countries like Korea and Japan and Western nations like the US.

China’s 5G rollout could seem similarly stalled if foreign telecoms can get new networks out as fast as they plan. American telecom Verizon, for example, says it will have some form of commericially-available 5G next year. Telecoms in other places, including Europe and Korea, are also already conducting 5G field tests.

The more interesting question may be what MIIT does with 5G network licenses.

Still, although China’s 4G rollout did seem painfully slow at the time, it’s tough to argue with the results. Just a couple years later, China Mobile is operating the largest 4G network on earth, and China has more 4G users than any other country (except India) has people. There is, clearly, a method to the madness (which my former colleague Paul Bischoff totally called, by the way).

The more interesting question may be what MIIT does with 5G network licenses. Because of different standards, China Telecom and China Unicom became the most popular providers of 3G, but they were leapfrogged by China Mobile with 4G in large part because Chinese authorities issued the license needed for China Mobile’s 4G network operations (TD-LTE) before issuing licenses for competing standards like FDD-LTE. It’s a little early to predict what the 5G landscape will look like in China, but TD-LTE was homegrown technology – expect MIIT to continue to favor domestic technology when it comes to 5G rollout rules.