In a keynote speech at the MWC Shanghai 2024 mobile show, the head of the GSM Association called China’s 5G subscriber growth “incredible.” The country’s carriers also strongly supported the association’s Open Gateway initiative.

One of the main drivers of revenue growth for Chinese carriers is cloud, which now accounts for nearly 12% of total revenue for Chinese telecom companies, with cloud revenue reaching $11 billion over the past three years, Granryd said.

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China records "staggering" 5G subscriber growth. Photo: 123RF

The GSM Association CEO also noted that 5G will continue to contribute to China's GDP, adding about $260 billion in 2030 from $130 billion in 2023. This is mainly due to the technology being applied in various verticals such as manufacturing, finance, construction and communications.

On the importance of AI in the telecommunications industry, Mr. Granryd stated that Chinese network operators are making impressive progress in the field of large language models (LLM). LLM is an AI system that is capable of understanding and generating human language by processing large amounts of text data.

“About 40% of global LLM is being developed in China. I know that China Mobile, China Telecom and China Unicom are all working on developing AI models and services to sell to enterprises,” he said.

According to China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, as of the end of February, China reached 851 million 5G subscribers, accounting for 48.8% of the total mobile subscribers of the three carriers China Telecom, China Mobile and China Unicom.

On October 31, 2019, the three carriers officially launched 5G networks. After four years, China has built more than 3.3 million 5G base stations, demonstrating its leading position in the development and application of 5G technology. The 5G network covers all counties and brings broadband Internet services to all villages. Rural and urban areas are basically balanced in terms of network quality and speed.

With the support of 5G and other technologies, China is also the first major economy where the number of IoT devices exceeds the number of mobile users. Currently, 5G is applied in 71 important categories of China's economy and has penetrated deeply into industries such as manufacturing, mining, energy, ports and healthcare.

(According to RCR Wireless, People's Daily Online)