China adds more than 10,000 5G base stations every week, but it will take at least 5 years for 5G network coverage?
M H Today, at the third session of the 13th National People’s Congress, Miao Wei, Minister of Industry and Information Technology, said that at present, my country is adding more than 10,000 5G base stations every week, and more than 7 million 5G users were added in a single month in April. The cumulative number of domestic 5G users has exceeded 36 million.
Since the beginning of this year, the construction speed of 5G has accelerated. Although the 5G construction in January, February and even March was affected to some extent by the epidemic, enterprises are still working hard to increase their construction efforts and try to catch up with time.
At the 2020 World Telecommunications and Information Society Day Conference on May 17, China’s three major operators and China Radio and Television announced their 5G plans.
At present, there are more than 240,000 5G base stations in China, including nearly 140,000 5G base stations by China Mobile and more than 100,000 5G base stations jointly built by China Telecom and China Unicom.
In addition, China Mobile plans to have more than 300,000 5G base stations by the end of this year; China Unicom and China Telecom will also jointly build and share site and spectrum resources, and strive to complete the construction of 250,000 base stations nationwide by 2020.
A practitioner in the telecommunications industry said that in recent months, major operators have increased the promotion of 5G packages, and 5G customers have increased rapidly, but a considerable number of these 5G package customers have not yet replaced 5G mobile phones.
However, although the construction speed of 5G base stations does not seem slow, according to industry insiders, it will take about 5 to 8 years before the full coverage of 5G networks.
The reason is that the construction cost of 5G network is high and the scale is 2-3 times larger than that of 4G. At present, there are about 5 million 4G network base stations. If 5G is to achieve network coverage comparable to that of 4G, 10 million units are needed, and at least 2 trillion yuan is needed.
Last year, operators built hundreds of thousands of 5G base stations, and a total of 1 million 5G base stations will be built this year. At this speed, it will take about 5-8 years for 5G to meet the basic coverage requirements—that is, deep coverage in large cities, coverage of key scenarios in prefectures and cities, and seamless access for enterprises.
However, with the recent rise of new 5G infrastructure, the pace of construction will further accelerate.
In addition, it is worth mentioning that it has been reported that the power consumption of 5G base stations is 3-4 times that of 4G base stations. In other words, the cost of 5G coverage is not limited to construction costs. The electricity cost of 5G base stations is also a considerable expenditure. For operators How to balance 5G investment is a big problem.
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