China’s path to 5G

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The number of Chinese netizens accessing the internet with mobile phones has increased significantly. In 2016, 92.5 percent accessed the internet on their mobile phones, up by 2.4 percentage points from 2015.

According to the latest count by the National Bureau of Statistics of China, the country has more than 1.3 billion mobile phone users in 2016. Over 940 million or about 71 percent were mobile broadband users. That’s 234 million more users from 2015. And according to the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT), the number of mobile users who are using 4G technology doubled from 2015, with 770 million people (or nearly 60 percent) using the said technology last year.

Implementing measures like increasing network speed and reducing access fees by sharing traffic and reserving unused data guarantees that China’s 3G and 4G users will continue to grow in number.

China Mobile, the largest telecommunications company in the country, for instance, is already moving toward the future with recent partnerships with Chinese major service providers and global telecommunications companies to develop 5G technologies.

In the 13th Five-Year Plan, it is proposed that China should actively promote 5G development and launch the technology by 2020. The objectives presented in the plan are:

• Promote the development of 5G key technologies
• Verify and improve 5G technical schemes
• Support the global unified 5G standardization

To reach those goals, China has built cooperation mechanisms with the EU, the US, Japan, and Korea on levels of government and industrial associations. Participants will include top telecom equipment makers such as Sweden’s Ericsson, Finland’s Nokia, China’s Huawei Technologies, and US chip makers Qualcomm and Intel. The presence of other industries like US-based General Motors, Germany’s Volkswagen, and the Haier Group hints on a wide range of potential mobile applications.

5G’s future minimum requirements

In February this year, the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) released a draft where the first definitions and guidelines of 5G technology are specified. The report also sets the minimum requirements for 5G mobile antennas.

5G will bring much faster data speeds than 4G. For example, the peak data rate for a single mobile station will have to be, according to the minimum technical performance requirements, 20 Gbit/s in download (2.5 gigabyte per second) and 10 Gbit/s in upload (1.5 gigabyte per second). For the user experience data rate (connection speed for each smartphone), it will be at least 100 Mbit/s in download (12.5 megabyte per second) and 50 Mbit/s in upload (6 megabyte per second).

However, latency, combined with connection speed, will affect end users the most, improving their mobile internet experience. In the 5G network, the maximum accepted latency is 4 milliseconds, which will represent a significant step forward compared to the 4G LTE connectivity, whose maximum latency is only 20 milliseconds.

The draft should be reviewed and confirmed by the ITU in a few months. Once it becomes standard, manufacturers will start churning out 5G smartphones.

5G trials in China

The Chinese government, through MIIT, has scheduled two phases for the 5G trials:

1. Technology R&D from 2015 to 2018 (This plan has three steps: key technology trial, technology scheme trial, and system trial)
2. Product R&D from 2018 to 2020

Future applications of 5G technology (IoT)

Conclusion