In the first anniversary of 5G licensing, increasing application scenarios requires extending the value of the industry chain
Words of a family
There are no special advantages in the existing 5G scene applications, and they have not really merged with personal production and life.
On June 6, the first anniversary of the issuance of 5G commercial licenses. A year ago, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology officially issued 5G licenses to the four operators of China Telecom, China Mobile, China Unicom, and China Radio and Television, allowing them to develop 5G commercial services. According to the Beijing News, within one year after the license was issued, the world's largest 5G network composed of more than 250,000 base stations has already stood in the land of China, and the cumulative 5G package users are close to 100 million.
Despite positive progress in 5G construction, the growth rate of 5G individual users is not obvious. According to the latest data released by the three major operators, as of the end of April, the number of 5G subscribers of China Mobile was 43.745 million, and that of China Telecom was 21.7 million. China Unicom did not separately announce the number of 5G users. Obviously, there is a big gap between the number of 5G users and the expectations of operators. The milestone application of 5G in the personal field has still not appeared, resulting in operators facing heavy challenges in the construction and operation of 5G.
Analysis of the reasons why the number of 5G personal users did not show a blowout growth, mainly due to factors such as 5G construction at the initial stage, incomplete industrial chain, and not many personal application scenarios.
First of all, the construction of 5G base stations is only carried out in major cities, and it is expected to cover prefecture-level cities before the end of the year. The vast counties and rural areas are not currently involved in the construction of 5G base stations. In this way, for users, 5G coverage is not wide enough, and applications are restricted, so that some rural users will not consider upgrading 5G packages for the time being. Users in some big cities are also on the sidelines due to the impact of 5G network coverage.
Secondly, to allow individuals to upgrade to 5G users, the most important thing is to bring more scene applications to make consumers feel beneficial and worthwhile. There are no special advantages in the existing 5G scene applications, and they have not really merged with personal production and life.
Finally, the small increase in 5G individual users is also related to the decline in people's income. In particular, some users' income is affected under the impact of the epidemic, which objectively leads to a decline in the demand for upgrading 5G and replacing mobile phones.
It can be seen that the current 5G personal users increase slowly, in line with the market law, and is the result of market allocation of resources. However, as a new industry, 5G investment will bring certain pressure to operators in the short term. For example, operators attract users by lowering package tariffs, which will increase capital pressure. If the tariffs are not reduced, package subscribers will increase more slowly and face the risk of customer churn under the competition mechanism.
In the long run, 5G is a highway in the era of information and data economy, and the industry has broad development prospects. The development of 5G industry has the law of large initial investment and the need to innovate more products to support development. This requires operators to make a large amount of infrastructure investment in advance, and to develop more 5G-based application scenarios of more new technologies, new products and services. At the same time, it is also necessary for the whole society to continue to increase reform and innovation, and promote the penetration and integration of 5G-based information and communication with industries such as industry, transportation, energy, and agriculture, so as to drive a digital, networked, and Intelligent transformation, improve the level of the entire industrial chain and supply chain, and allow more new economic models to operate steadily on the 5G information highway.
□Muding (financial commentator)