It is estimated that by 2025, China's 5G users will reach 739 million

In terms of annual mobile data consumption, it is estimated that by 2025, my country's annual 5G data traffic will reach 782 exabytes, accounting for nearly 60% of the global 5G data consumption.

"Unlike other early adopters such as South Korea, the United States, Finland, Japan, and many others, mobile operators in China are owned by the government, which allows them to receive broad support to develop 5G networks especially in the consumer market," said Jiancao Hou, senior analyst for 5G and mobile network infrastructure at ABI Research. "From a spectrum perspective, mobile operators received licenses for 5G spectrum for testing and trial in 2018, which gave them a good opportunity to plan the best network deployment strategy and prepare for the 5G commercial launch next year. Moreover, "given the momentum of 5G deployment in China, the current trade war and ban on domestic Chinese vendors will not slow down 5G deployment in China, at least not in the next 2 to 3 years."

The report said that as of October 2020, China's mobile operators had deployed a total of 690,000 5G base stations.

China Unicom and China Telecom will jointly deploy their own independent 5G infrastructure and share radio frequency resources. On the other hand, China Mobile will continue to promote dual-mode solutions (NSA and SA) to better support international roaming, and the cooperation strategy with China Broadcasting Network is under discussion.

"At this stage, there are no clear strategic guidelines to promote local licensed spectrum access or unlicensed and shared spectrum usage in China's telecom market," Hou said. "Considering the comprehensive fiber deployment across the country, fixed wireless access and millimeter wave deployment may receive limited attention, except for traffic offloading at hotspots."

The analyst also stressed that banning Chinese suppliers from developing from other countries could stimulate the revival of domestic supply chains in the Chinese market.

Chinese operators added a total of 16.94 million 5G users in February this year, according to monthly statistics published on the operators' websites.

China Mobile, the world's largest operator by subscribers, added 4.19 million 5G subscribers in February. The operator said it had a total of 173.16 million 5G subscribers as of February, compared with 15.4 million in February 2020.

Meanwhile, rival China Telecom added 6.2 million 5G subscribers in February, bringing its total 5G subscribers to 103,370.

In addition, China Unicom had 84.5 million 5G users at the end of February, up from 77.95 million in the previous month.