(Economic Observer) Why should 5G investment be moderately advanced?

　　China News Service, Beijing, October 7 (Reporter Liu Yuying) In the movie "My Hometown and Me" that was screened during the National Day holiday, a 5G base station standing in the middle of farmland demonstrates China's enthusiasm for 5G construction.

On the eve of National Day, China has 600,000 5G base stations.

　　However, there are also different voices around 5G applications and 5G technology.

For example, recently some voices believe that 5G is costly, technically not mature enough, no application scenarios are found, and 5G investment has been excessively advanced.

　　Indeed, compared with the 3G and 4G eras, China has taken the lead in the 5G era for the first time: the time to issue licenses is in the first wave; technically, China’s 5G standard essential patents rank first in the world; on the terminal, China’s 5G mobile phone output Yiqi Juechen; China also has a relatively complete communications industry industrial chain.

　　The industry's leading position also allows China to enter the "frontier zone" of innovation, and it needs to constantly overcome issues such as technology, application, and cost.

For example, China is the first country in the world preparing to build a 5G independent network nationwide, and there is no successful experience to learn from.

　　It will take time for 5G technology to mature, and China must be at the forefront of innovation.

Now the international standards organization 3GPP has released two 5G standard versions, R15 and R16. Among them, the standards for low-latency and high-reliability application scenarios such as industrial Internet and Internet of Vehicles were just completed at the end of June this year.

The third edition of the standard (R17) for the massive machine-type communication scenarios with large connections and low power consumption is expected to be completed by the end of 2021, and the subsequent maturity of related equipment products will take longer.

　　In terms of application, ultra-high-definition live broadcast, cloud gaming, virtual reality and other applications are beginning to take shape.

A series of industry applications such as 5G mines, 5G ports, and 5G+ industrial Internet have been continuously implemented, and hundreds of application scenarios are under continuous exploration.

But profitable 5G killer applications have yet to appear.

　　Telecom industry experts said that the current exploration of 5G applications in China has entered the "innovation frontier zone", especially for enterprises and government-oriented 5G applications, there is no existing experience to follow, requiring greater trial and error costs than in the 3G/4G era.

　　Nevertheless, China still needs to deploy 5G in advance.

The emergence of killer applications depends on the Internet first.

The emergence of 3G has sparked mobile e-commerce and social applications, and 4G has inspired mobile payments and short videos. These "killer" personal user services have basically appeared 2-3 years after online commercial use.

　　5G has a huge engine effect on the economy.

Shi Wei, former director of the Industry Office of the Institute of Economic System and Management of the National Development and Reform Commission, believes that 5G, as the underlying transmission network, needs to be integrated with big data, artificial intelligence, and the Internet of Things to produce revolutionary changes in computing, such as the edge Computing, network slicing, etc., can help the intelligent transformation of various industries, which also requires the network to go first.

　　Chen Zhigang, an expert in the telecommunications industry, said that a moderate advance in 5G investment is of great significance for increasing the scale of ICT (information and communication technology) capital and continuing to expand the proportion of the digital economy in GDP.

　　The advance layout of 5G has become a consensus.

According to data from the Global Mobile Suppliers Association, as of mid-September, 101 operators worldwide have launched one or more 5G commercial services that comply with 3GPP standards in 44 countries or regions.

　　The maturity of 5G technology products has its objective laws.

Liu Liehong, Vice Minister of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology of China, said that from the perspective of the relationship between networks and applications, a moderately advanced network is the basis for application development.

In the next 3 years, 5G will still be in the "introduction period."

(Finish)