The core of the current national economic development is to achieve economic shift transformation through the upgrading of the manufacturing industry, and vigorously develop 5G is not only for communication and commercial use, but the real mission of 5G is to accelerate the upgrading of the industrial manufacturing industry, so as to promote the high-quality development of the economy.

5G is the infrastructure of the digital economy

A few days ago, the executive meeting of The State Council pointed out that it is necessary to increase support for the “Internet ++” and platform economy, and strengthen the new business forms of the digital economy. From the scale of the digital economy, in 2018, the total amount of China’s digital economy reached 31.3 trillion yuan, accounting for more than one-third of GDP, reaching 34.8%, accounting for a year-on-year increase of 1.9 percentage points. The vigorous development of the digital economy has promoted the transformation and upgrading of traditional industries and added new drivers to economic development. In 2018, the contribution rate of the digital economy to GDP growth reached 67.9 percent, an increase of 12.9 percent year-on-year, surpassing the level of some developed countries and becoming a core and key force driving China’s national economic development.

The development of the digital economy relies on the “new infrastructure” including 5G, the digital economy and 5G are the relationship between “soldiers and horses” and “grain and grass”, the so-called “soldiers and horses have not moved, grain and grass first.”

As a key new infrastructure to support the digitalization, networking and intelligent transformation of the economy and society, 5G not only plays a prominent role in epidemic prevention and control and resumption of work and production, but also has great potential in stabilizing investment, promoting consumption, facilitating upgrading, and cultivating new drivers of economic development. Experts believe that 5G investment will directly bring about the rapid development of telecommunications operations, equipment manufacturing and information services, and through the correlation effect between industries, drive industries to expand investment in information and communication technology applications, enhance the investment driven increasing effect, and will be combined with digital infrastructure such as artificial intelligence and data centers. We will build an ecosystem with broad participation of the whole society and cross-industry integration and innovation.

Why should we vigorously develop 5G is not simply because of the problem of network speed, but also the cornerstone of the information society.

The state vigorously supports 5G construction

Because of the importance of 5G, China’s investment support for 5G is very large.

First, the free allocation of 5G spectrum. Overseas, such as India will auction 5G spectrum, according to the current reserve price regulations, each telecom operator will pay up to 500 billion to 550 billion Indian rupees ($7.2 billion) for every 100MHz of spectrum. China’s allocation to mobile 260M, telecom Unicom 100M, radio and television 160M is free.

Secondly, the policy support is strong. At the policy level, the state has spared no effort to support 5G, not only allocating spectrum in a timely manner, issuing 5G commercial licenses, but also providing policy convenience to all relevant enterprises.

Third, financial assistance. All localities directly subsidize operators to build 5G base stations, and Shenzhen subsidizes 15,000 to SA base stations; Guangzhou and other places have given subsidies.

According to the data released by the three major operators, more than 150,000 base stations have been opened in China at present, and by the end of 2020, more than 550,000 5G base stations are planned to be opened. Coupled with radio and television, the 5G base station construction scale of the four domestic operators will reach 600,000. By this calculation, the current operators have completed about 25% of the task.

Among them, China Telecom held a national 5G Phase II project construction task deployment meeting on March 12, and plans to take the lead in completing the construction of 250,000 5G base stations in the country in the third quarter, and strive to take the lead in realizing 5G SA commercial. On March 20, China Telecom announced the main operating data in February 2020, showing that the net number of China Telecom mobile users decreased by 5.6 million in the month, and the total number of mobile users was 330.4 million, of which the total number of China Telecom 5G package users was 10.73 million, which is the first time that China Telecom announced the number of 5G package users in the main monthly operating data.