5G development still has a long way to go

The construction and development of 5G has gone through 3 years. In the past three years, China's 5G construction and development achievements are obvious to all: as of April this year, my country has built and opened 1.615 million 5G base stations, built the world's largest 5G network, the world's largest 5G co-construction and shared network, and developed 5G mobile phone users4.13 100 million households; 5G is forming a number of typical application scenarios with commercial value in various industries such as industry, medical care, education, transportation, etc., which have covered 40 of the 97 categories of the national economy, and the cumulative application cases have reached 23,000; 5G The number of industry virtual private networks has reached 5,325, which has become an important infrastructure supporting the digital transformation of my country's industries.

It can be said that the communication industry has handed over a beautiful answer sheet in the construction and development of 5G. This answer sheet also effectively refutes the voices who questioned 5G at the beginning, and positively affirms the achievements of China's 5G in the past three years, which has a great impact on the development of the industry. The positive significance is especially significant for the high-quality development of the digital economy that the current government is fully promoting. But it is still too early to declare 5G success, and 5G development still has a long way to go. After all, how to further reduce construction, operation and maintenance costs, how to break through barriers to cross-industry collaboration, and how to cultivate "killer" applications, so that 5G applications can be replicated and promoted from leading industries to thousands of industries... These are the next steps for the communications industry to solve. question.

First, the application results of 5G to B industry still need to be deepened. As mentioned above, the domestic 5G to B business has been widely used in some fields, especially in the industrial Internet field vigorously promoted by the government, 5G has been widely used in steel, machinery, transportation, energy and other industries, "5G + Industrial Internet" There are more than 1,800 projects under construction, forming 20 typical application scenarios such as remote equipment control, machine vision quality inspection, and production energy efficiency control. Some scenarios have begun to be copied in batches. But it is undeniable that the breadth and depth of 5G to B industry applications still need to be strengthened. From the perspective of the transformation of the "Blooming Cup" 5G application innovation achievements, the efficiency of 5G application commercial transformation and large-scale replication still needs to be improved.

Second, 5G to C applications need a comprehensive breakthrough. As of April, the three major operators have developed a total of 413 million 5G users, which is not a figure to be proud of. There are 1.643 billion mobile users in China, why after three years of development, 5G users only account for 1/4 of the total number of users? Statistics show that the 5G offload of the three major telecom operators accounts for more than 20% of the total mobile traffic, and the 5G traffic in key regions such as Guangdong, Zhejiang, Shanghai, and Beijing accounts for more than 30% of the mobile traffic. But who split the other 70% of the traffic? Is it 4G or Wi-Fi? These two points show that the majority of consumers are still not very "cold" about 5G applications. The key to why users don't "catch a cold" with 5G is that 5G has no applications that make users shine. How to make the real "killer" applications in the 5G era appear as soon as possible is an urgent problem to be solved in the current communication industry.

The third is how 5G can play a greater role in stabilizing growth and driving the high-quality development of the digital economy. In the first half of this year, the repeated outbreaks of COVID-19 had a serious impact on economic development. The State Council recently issued the "Package of Policies and Measures for Solidly Stabilizing the Economy" including 33 items in 6 areas, to ensure that the epidemic must be prevented, the economy must be stabilized, and development must be safe. The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology also held a special teleconference on boosting the industrial economy, further pointing out that new infrastructure such as 5G and the Industrial Internet should be deployed moderately ahead of schedule. According to the forecast of the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology, by 2025, 5G can drive network investment of about 1.2 trillion yuan, and directly drive the total economic output of about 10.1 trillion yuan. After three years of construction and development, 5G has laid a solid foundation in terms of network facilities, user popularization, industry practices, and commercial operations, and has become the foundation of my country's digital economy in the new era. Therefore, how to give full play to 5G's "information artery" connection ability and digital intelligence empowerment effect is crucial to stabilizing the economic market and promoting economic growth.