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Text |ICT Interpreter – Lao Jie.It has been more than four years since South Korean operators took the lead in launching 5G commercial use in 2019, and according to the intergenerational paradigm of "one G in ten years" in the mobile communications industry, the 5G era has reached the halfway point and will enter the 6G era by 2030However, from a global perspective, although the process of large-scale construction of 5G networks is still in full swing, the voices questioning the commercial value of 5G are getting louder and louder in the industry, and even the view that "5G has failed" is also heard endlessly on social networking.
So, standing at the time node of four years of commercial use, what kind of face does the 5G era present at the moment?
With the commercial launch of 5G around the world, large-scale 5G network construction and the rapid growth of 5G users have created a thriving prosperity for the mobile communications industry.
According to the statistics of GSMA, a global industry organization for mobile communications, by the end of the third quarter of 2023, 258 operators in 100 markets around the world have commercialized 5G services, deployed 4.81 million 5G base stations, and the scale of 5G users has exceeded 14200 million, with a penetration rate of 166%。
Especially in countries and regions that are the first to commercialize 5G, the prosperity of 5G development is even more eye-catching. China's three major operators have built 3.19 million 5G base stations in about three years, accounting for 66% of the world's total 5G base stationsGood 5G network coverage also drove the number of 5G subscribers in the Chinese market to reach 73.7 billion, with a penetration rate of nearly 43%, accounting for more than half of the world's 5G users, making it the world's largest 5G market.
In addition, South Korea, the world's first commercial 5G, is also continuing to lead, with 230,000 5G base stations in the country creating 41 per 10,000 peopleThe world's highest record for 5G base stations;With the unremitting promotion of South Korean operators, the penetration rate of 5G users in the Korean market has reached 50%;At the same time, the proportion of 5G terminals in the South Korean market is 82%, which is the country with the highest penetration rate of 5G terminals in the world, and the DOU (average monthly data traffic per user) of 5G terminals in the whole network is as high as 29GB, making the traffic of 5G terminals in the Korean market account for 80% of the entire network.
The U.S. 5G market has been slow to build a network due to the choice of millimeter wave spectrum in the early stage, which has largely restricted the development of 5G. Starting from 2021, as the mainstream 5G frequency bands in North America have changed from millimeter wave to centimeter wave and low frequency, mainstream operators in the United States have actively promoted the construction of 5G base stations, and the current 5G network coverage rate has exceeded 90%. And the U.S. has become the world's largest 5G FWA (Fixed Wireless Access) market, with nearly 7 million 5G FWA connections todayThanks to FWA's high DOU (about 500GB per month), T-Mobile's 5G network offload ratio exceeds 70%, making it one of the most utilized 5G networks in the world.
Following in the footsteps of 5G leaders, the Indian market is also trying to catch up. Following the completion of the 5G spectrum auction in August 2022, India's two largest operators, Reliance Jio and Bharti Airtel, launched a rapid 5G network build, building an average of 1,200 stations per day and opening 300,000 5G base stations in just one year. Due to the low-tariff marketing strategy adopted by Indian operators, the average DOU per smartphone in the Indian market is 31GB, which is the highest in the worldWith the acceleration of 5G commercialization, the DOU in the Indian market is expected to further increase to 75GB by 2029.
GSMA**, the number of 5G connections worldwide will grow from 1.5 billion in 2023 to 3 billion by 2026, when 5G penetration will reach 30% and will overtake 4G as the dominant mobile technology by 2029.
There is no doubt about the advancement of 5G as a new generation of communication technology, but to measure the success of 5G, it also depends on whether it can bring commercial returns to the industry through the test of the market.
The number of 5G subscribers is growing, and the data traffic of 5G networks is also rising, but the life of operators is not getting any better.
Although the introduction of 5G services has played a certain role in curbing the continuous decline in ARPU since the beginning of the 4G era, and the global mobile data traffic has also shown an astonishing growth momentum at an average rate of doubling every two years, the report of industry consulting firm Omdia shows that the business revenue of global communication operators has fallen from -1 in 2Q226% expanded to -3 in 2Q2'238%。
This is true not only for the industry average, but also for the leading operators who are the first to commercialize 5G. As one of the first markets in the world to launch 5G services, mobile internet access traffic for Chinese subscribers reached 261.8 billion GB at the end of 2022, an increase of 2% compared to 122 billion GB in 2019, the year of 5G commercialization15 times;However, the revenue of mobile data traffic business in 2022 was 639.7 billion yuan, an increase of only 5% from 609 billion yuan in 2019.
Not only is this the status quo, but it may also be difficult to change in the future. According to industry consultancy Omdia**, global mobile data traffic will grow by 218 in the next 5 years due to the popularity of 5G9%, but the mobile operator's business revenue will only grow by 146%, while the ARPU (average revenue per user) will drop by 75%。
The faster 5G has driven a significant increase in data traffic, but it has not brought significant revenue growth to operators, but the construction of 5G networks to carry massive data traffic has caused operators' costs to rise significantly
The first is the cost of spectrum auctions。The characteristics of 5G high speed, large bandwidth and low latency require higher continuous spectrum to support, and C-Band (3GHz 6GHz) has become the main spectrum of the global 5G network, but due to the scarcity of high-quality spectrum resources, most other markets except China have adopted the method of bidding for 5G spectrum allocation.
The surge in data traffic in the 4G era has stimulated operators' optimistic expectations for 5G services, so the competition for 5G spectrum is particularly fierce. At the beginning of 2020, Taiwan 3In the 5GHz spectrum auction, the five operators made a total of more than 200 rounds of bidding before the dust settled, and finally the bandwidth was about 1. per 10MHzThe average winning bid of $6.8 billion refreshed the previous record of 1A world record of $0.7 billion.
Among them, Chunghwa Telecom** about 1.5 billion US dollars received 390MHz bandwidth of 5GHz spectrum, far EasTone telecommunications** about 13$500 million for 80MHz bandwidth, Taiwan Big Brother for about $1 billion for 60MHz bandwidth, while weaker APT Telecom and Taiwan Star failed to win the bid 35GHz spectrum, and finally merged by Far EasTone telecommunications and Taiwan Big Brother in 2023, and even failed to cross the threshold of the 5G era.
But the world record for 5G spectrum auctions didn't stop there, and on February 24, 2021, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) announced that C-BAND (37ghz-3.98GHz), with a total auction value of $81.1 billion, setting a record for the highest auction ever held by the FCC. Among them, Verizon invested $45.5 billion for 160MHz bandwidth, AT&T invested $23.4 billion for 80MHz bandwidth, and T-Mobile invested $9.3 billion for 20MHz bandwidth, and the average winning price per 10MHz bandwidth of the three operators soared to $3 billion.
The second is the cost of 5G network construction。The higher the frequency of electromagnetic waves, the shorter the wavelength, the closer the propagation distance, and the easier the signal attenuation, the physical characteristics determine that the cost of 5G network construction on the mainstream C-Band is much higher than that of 4G concentrated on the spectrum below 3GHz: on the one hand, to achieve the same coverage scale, the number of 5G base stations required must be more than 4G, on the other hand, the wireless new air technology with large bandwidth and low latency requires 5G to use higher performance processing chips. Radio frequency units and large-scale antenna arrays have further pushed up the cost of 5G base stations.
Taking the Chinese market, which accounts for 66% of the total number of 5G base stations in the world, as an example, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology's communications industry statistical bulletin shows that from the start of 5G construction in 2019 to the end of 2022, the fixed asset investment (CAPEX) of the three major operators for 5G networks has reached more than 580 billion, and 2.31 million 5G base stations have been built, with an average investment of 250,000 yuan per stationBy the end of 2019, the total number of 4G base stations in the Chinese market was 5.44 million, and the three major operators had invested a total of 506.8 billion yuan in 4G network CAPEX, with an average of only 930,000 yuan.
From a global perspective, a report by industry consulting firm Omdia shows that since the start of 5G network construction in the third quarter of 2019, the global communications industry's capital expenditure on mobile networks has been increasing quarter by quarter.
In addition, there are the operating costs of 5G networks。Compared with the 4 antennas and 8 antennas of the 4G network, the number of channels using Massive MIMO technology can be expanded to 32 or 64, and the number of antenna arrays can be even higher, although its gain greatly exceeds that of 4G equipment, but it also leads to the energy consumption of a single station of 5G base station is much higher than that of 4G base station.
Taking the Chinese market as an example, China Telecom's annual social responsibility report disclosed that since the start of 5G network construction in 2019, the power consumption per carrier frequency of its network base stations has continued to rise, reaching 1438 kWh by the end of 2022, more than twice that of 2018.
For operators, higher power consumption at a single carrier frequency and a single base station means more electricity bills. According to data from the China Communications Standards Association, the no-load power consumption of 5G mainstream base station equipment is about 22-2.3 kilowatts, full load power consumption of about 37-3.9 kilowatts, more than three times that of 4G base stations. It has been measured with an average of 1The annual electricity cost of a 4G base station is 20,280 yuan, and the annual electricity cost of a 5G base station will be as high as 54,600 yuan. By the end of 2022, China Telecom and China Unicom have jointly built and shared nearly 700,000 5G base stations (excluding indoor substations), and the annual expenditure on electricity alone exceeds 38 billion yuan.
Although the system capacity and transmit power of 5G base stations far exceed those of 4G base stations, and the average power consumption per bit of traffic at full load is significantly better than that of 4G, the increase in operating costs caused by the absolute energy consumption of 5G base stations has become a heavy financial pressure for global operators whose 5G network utilization is still in the ramp-up stage.
In short,Operators' investment and operating expenses for 5G have accumulated significantly with the increase in the number of 5G base stations, but the 5G business revenue has not been significantly improved due to the increase in data traffic, and the mismatch between input and output is reflected in the operators' financial statements
Taking the major telecom companies selected for the 2023 Fortune Global 500 as an example, China Mobile (63rd), Verizon (64th), AT&T (78th), NTT DOCOMO (109th), China Telecom (No. 132) and China Unicom (No. 267), starting from 2018, from 2019 or 2020 to 2022, their operating margins have basically been declining year by year.
In particular, it should be pointed out that the operating profit of these operators as of 2022 does not include the fixed capital expenditure (CAPEX) for 5G network construction. According to accounting principles, the fixed capital expenditure of operators for 5G networks will not be included in the profit accounting in the form of "asset depreciation" costs until at least 5-8 years have passed.
It can be expected that if operators cannot find a way out in terms of commercial returns on 5G services and cannot drive significant growth in revenue levels, then in 3 to 5 years, it is likely that a large number of operators' profit statements will be crushed by the huge depreciation of 5G assets.
Although the fixed capital expenditure of 5G has not affected operating profits for the time being, the huge pressure on cash flow has already overwhelmed weaker operators: after entering the 5G era, more and more operators have been forced to launch a series of measures including strategic mergers and acquisitions, cost reduction, large-scale layoffs, etc. to save themselves.
In addition to the acquisition of Asia-Pacific Telecom and Taiwan Star in the Taiwanese market, which did not have enough financial resources to bid for 5G spectrum, Thailand's third-largest operator, DTAC, also failed to acquire 26GHz Spectrum and in late 2021 announced a merger with the second-largest mobile operator, True Move. In addition, in order to optimize 5G network construction and O&M costs through economies of scale, Spanish operators Masmovil and Orange, and British operators Vodafone UK and Three UK announced their merger decisions in June 2022 and June 2023, respectively. At the end of 2023, the CEO of Dish Network, a U.S. mobile operator, announced a merger with satellite communications operator Echostar due to a shortage of funds to invest in 5G network construction, which endangered its financial security.
In order to reduce network investment and ensure healthy cash flow, Philippine operator PLDT will retrofit 2,500 of the 7,200 5G base stations built back to 4G base stations in the first half of 2023, after stopping the construction of new 5G base stations in 2022. In May 2023, Vietnam** will launch 23GHz 5G spectrum auction, but in the face of the auction reserve price of about 5.2 million US dollars per 10MHz, none of the four operators in Vietnam made a bid, resulting in the auction aborted, and the Vietnamese market has not yet started 5G commercialization.
Even the powerful American operator AT&T broke the big news that caused a sensation in the industry at the end of 2023, and because the return of 5G business was less than expected, AT&T turned to transfer the pressure on the company's profitability to 5G ** companies. In order to reduce costs immediately, AT&T adopted the open network architecture of Open RAN and the negotiation strategy of exclusive suppliers, and conducted 8 months of arduous negotiations with the existing suppliers Ericsson and Nokia, and finally Ericsson made huge concessions and signed a five-year $14 billion 5G network construction contract with AT&T, which originally spent $14 billion to $19 billion a year for equipment and service procurement, while also bearing the cost of replacing all the existing network equipment of its competitor Nokia.
While it remains to be seen whether the Open RAN 5G network will help AT&T maintain an edge in the user market, AT&T's urgent need to save money on 5G has been achieved for the time being. Also in order to save money, more and more operators have begun to build 5G networks in lower frequency bands, and the low-frequency networks originally used for 2G or 3G have been recultivated to 5G, although the procurement cost has been greatly reduced, but the low-frequency attributes of 2 3G and only about 20M bandwidth have greatly reduced the characteristics of 5G technology high speed and large bandwidth, which is also regarded as a compromise of technology to cost caused by the 5G commercial return in the mobile communications industry is less than expected.
The root cause of the shambles on the commercial returns of the ostensibly prosperous 5G is that the mobile communications industry is copying the "path dependence" of the business model of the pre-4G era when putting 5G technology into the market.
In the process of intergenerational evolution from 2G to 4G, the mobile communications industry has formed a set of successful business models. In the 2G era, voice is king, and the communications industry has begun to replace mobile with fixed, and the business growth of operators is driven by the continuous growth of the number of mobile phone usersIn the 3G era, information services exploded, and the mobile Internet began to replace the PC Internet, and operators made a lot of money by virtue of their control over content entrances and distribution channelsIn the 4G era, mobile Internet access has become the mainstream, and data traffic has begun to blow out.
Therefore, when 5G technology, which is characterized by "high bandwidth", "low latency" and "massive connection", comes out, operators who are accustomed to "path dependence" still continue the existing traditional model when they put it to market: through large-scale investment to quickly achieve "seamless coverage" of 5G networks, they believe that as long as it provides faster network speed and greater bandwidth, it will pull more mobile phone users to generate more data traffic, thereby creating more business revenue.
In order to prove to the capital market the myth that the mobile communications industry can achieve sustainable growth through continuous technological iteration, operators have also copied the KPIs of the 2G and 4G eras, and applied the growth KPIs of "number of users" and "DOU (data usage)" to measure the success of 5G. Then, in order to improve the "number of 5G users", "5G penetration", and "5G DOU", which represent the performance of the operation, operators are familiar with the market means of preferential tariffs to stimulate mobile phone users to upgrade to 5G.
In the South Korean market, in order to increase 5G data traffic, South Korean operators have repeatedly lowered the unlimited 5G *** at the same time, and also included the data traffic generated by 5G mobile phones on the 4G network into the original KPI indicator of "5G terminal traffic", thus creating a world record that the proportion of 5G terminal traffic in the Korean market has reached 80% of the entire network.
In the Chinese market, the three major operators led by China Mobile have also creatively put forward the KPI indicator of "5G** users", and even did not hesitate to open 5G ** for 4G users who do not have 5G mobile phones and do not use 5G networks through tariff concessions, making the number of 5G** users in the Chinese market reach 13 by the end of October 2023200 million, almost all of the people are 5G, but the cumulative shipment of 5G mobile phones in the entire market is only 8400 million.
Operators are paying the price of selling faster, more advanced, and more expensive 5G cheaper than 4G, and the consequence is that 5G user ARPU (average revenue per user) has been declining since the beginning of commercial use. Taking China Telecom, one of the world's first commercial 5G operators, as an example, at the end of June 2020, the average monthly revenue of 5G users for China Telecom was 806 yuan, but by the end of June 2023, 5G users will only bring 48 yuan to China Telecom on average every monthThe income of 7 yuan is even lower than 49 of 4G users at the end of 2019$5.
The path that operators rely on is to continue to replicate the successful experience of the previous generation of "price for volume" in the 5G era, and leverage the increase in total business volume with a lower market, so as to achieve continuous growth in business revenue。However, operators who are familiar with the old road ignore the changes in the external environment: the mobile communication industry has entered the era of stock market, and the ceiling of growth is almost everywhere.
In the first-mover market that is the first to commercialize 5G, the penetration rate of mobile phones is basically more than 100%, and the growth of the total number of users has long touched the ceiling, and the structural increment comes from the upgrade of 3 4G users to 5G, but if the 5G tariff and ARPU value are lower than 4G, then the growth of the number of upgraded users cannot bring additional revenue to operators.
On the other hand, the limited time spent on mobile phones has also become a ceiling restricting the continuous growth of mobile phone data traffic. According to dataAccording to AI's statistical report, many countries around the world have spent more than 5 hours of mobile phone usage per day, so data traffic has bid farewell to the rapid growth. Ericsson's latest mobile market report shows that the year-on-year growth rate of global mobile network data traffic has dropped from a peak of more than 90% in the 4G era to about 30% today.
The mobile communications industry has become a stock market, but operators' 5G business models are still stuck in the supply thinking, believing that as long as the pipes are constantly thickened, there will always be a steady stream of traffic to fill the pipes.
Therefore, they refer to the 4G experience to blame the current business dilemma of 5G on the lack of "killer applications" in the 4G era to drive traffic growth, and almost obsessively believe that as long as they find or wait for the "killer application", all the problems of 5G will be solved.
As a result, operators around the world are looking for "killer applications" in the 4G-like era as the way out of the 5G business dilemma
The experience of Korean operators is still back to 3G (girl, game, gambling), but with 5G blessing VR, AR and other new technologies, although it has set off a trend, but limited by hardware capabilities and purchasing power, it is difficult to be as popular as mobile phones and mobile games in the 4G era.
Chinese operators are obsessed with regaining the content entrance of the 3G era, so the three major operators have joined forces to create "5G messaging", hoping to replace the position of Tencent WeChat on 5G mobile phones, and with the help of the official power of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, all mobile phones connected to the network must be pre-installed, optimistic that a piece of paper can change the habits of mobile phone users for many years.
In contrast, U.S. operators T-Mobile and Verizon have taken 5G FWA (fixed wireless access) as an attack on the fixed-line broadband market, and with a low price strategy of $20-30 per month and a commitment to fast turn-up, they quickly opened up the situation in the U.S. market with imperfect broadband services. By the end of September 2023, T-Mobile and Verizon had captured 4.2 million and 2.7 million FWA customers, respectively, from cable providers and DSL providers. However, for AT&T, which operates both mobile and fixed-line services, FWA is tantamount to playing with each other, so it is more cautious.
India's largest mobile operator, Reliance Jio, has also announced the launch of 5G FWA services to overcome the challenge of slow fibre-to-the-home last-mile pipes and accelerate broadband network coverage, driven by the good development of FWA in the US market. JIO has set a market target of 100 million households for 5G FWA, and if the target is achieved, JIO will become the world's largest FWA service provider.
According to Ericsson's latest mobile market report, as of November 2023, a total of 121 operators around the world provide 5G FWA services, and FWA data traffic accounts for 19% of global mobile network data traffic, and is expected to increase more than five-fold in 2029, approaching 30% of total mobile data traffic. As a result, market research firm Counterpoint called 5G FWA a "killer application" for replacing wired broadband services in underserved markets.
Although the data traffic per GB is lower than that of mobile phones, the data traffic brought to the 5G network is very considerable, and the DOU of 5G FWA in the US market is about 500G, which is almost 20 times that of mobile phone users. For mobile operators who are worried about the low utilization rate of 5G networks, they can not only use 5G FWA to seize the market share of fixed-line broadband service providers, but also make full use of the idle network assets they have invested to earn additional business income, which will indeed help improve the business return of 5G in the short term.
However, with the continuous expansion of FWA services, the increase in traffic pressure may force operators to continue to increase network investment for this low-value service, thus breaking the equilibrium of their input-output ratioIn addition, compared with the 500M or 1000M network speed of fixed network broadband, the 100 Gigabit speed of 5G FWA is obviously technically weak, and its market space is very vulnerable to the first-class strategy of fixed broadband service providersEspecially in markets where fiber penetration is high, FWA is almost useless.
Therefore, FWA is obviously not a "killer application" that can be fully popularized in the 5G era, but its successful cases in the limited market may also prove that the so-called "killer application" is actually a traditional business model that changes the supply thinking, returns to the origin of market demand, and explores the value of 5G technology in creating a new incremental market.
As a generation of technologies defined by the mobile communications industry as "changing society", the transcendence of 5G over the "life-changing" 4G is to help operators jump out of the user market with increasingly saturated mobile phone penetration, empower industry markets with larger connection requirements, lower connection delay requirements, and higher connection performance requirements, accurately deploy 5G private networks around industry application requirements, and steadily promote the construction and commercial process of 5G networks from point to point.
For example, based on the demand of industry customers for data not to appear, 5G technology can quickly build a customized industry private network with security, reliability, stable performance, and visual services in the form of a private network, realize high-definition backhaul, remote control and other operation scenarios, and create new industrial value from the innovative needs of supporting industrial Internet such as intelligent manufacturing and smart healthcare. In this process, operators can also create new customer value by creating new operating models and business models from the perspective of serving customers and solving problems for the industry.
Of course, unlike the universal service of the mobile phone user market, the industry market is fragmented, the needs of thousands of industries are different, and the business model is more complex, and industry customers need not only 5G, but the business value brought by the faster and more efficient connection capabilities of 5G to upper-layer applications. Therefore, for operators specializing in communication capabilities, in order to gain benefits through 5G empowerment industries, they must make up for the technical shortcomings of cross-border capabilities such as IT capabilities and cloud capabilities, or need to increase investment in talent training, or need to be integrated by partners at a low level, which not only has a long project cycle and cannot be completed quickly, but also makes it difficult to achieve large-scale replication.
Therefore, although it is known that the greatest value of 5G technology lies in the industry market, for operators, it is obvious that the rapid commercialization of 5G technology is the first choice, so operators who are accustomed to using scale effect to quickly pull the market will use high-cost 5G mainly to solve the problem of 4G traffic congestion.
As of the end of September 2023, only 42 of the world's 258 5G commercial networks have achieved 5G standalone networks required for industry applications, and the other 216 5G commercial networks are still stuck in non-standalone networks based on 4G anchors to support their market competition with the goal of 5G coverage of the percentage of the population。As a result, operators have invested heavily in 5G networks with seamless coverage one after another, betting on price for volume in the increasingly saturated mobile phone user market, and finally falling into a business dilemma of mismatch between input and output.
Therefore, in order to get out of the current business dilemma in the 5G era, operators need to change their supply thinking and return to the origin of market demand.
As 5G technology continues to evolve, 5G-ADance (5G-A), represented by RedCap, is about to start the second half of 5G. The so-called lightweight 5G is actually to streamline the "excess capacity" of 5G to adapt to the market opportunity of IoT upgrading according to the industry market's demand for 5G with lower cost, lower power consumption, and lower complexity.
In addition, in the deployment of 5G-A, operators are also reflecting on and learning the lessons of 5G network construction. Wu Hequan, academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, who has a significant influence on the 5G development strategy of the Chinese market, delivered a keynote speech on "5G Model Innovation and Restart" at the 2023 World 5G Conference. In his speech, Academician Wu confirmed the problems of the current 5G model, noted operators' concerns about the protection of historical investment and asset returns that 5G-A may bring, and faced the soul question of "the return on investment in the previous round is not enough, is the new investment worthwhile", Academician Wu's suggestion is that "5G-A does not need to cover the whole network, but only 5G supplement in hot spots", and called on operators to explore the operation mode of 5G-A private network.
RedCap, which streamlines the excess capacity of 5G in terms of technology, and 5G-A, which does not cover the whole network in terms of deployment, is a pragmatic reflection of the mobile communication industry's return to market demand for the next development of 5G, and to a certain extent, it can also be regarded as a declaration of the end of the traditional business model in the 5G era.
A few days ago, the 2023 Brooklyn 6G Summit was held in New York, USA, and at the summit with the theme of "Create the Foundation for 6G" (Create the Foundation for 6G), Chris Sambar, Executive Vice President of AT&T Technology, focused on the judgment of the return on investment of 5G far less than expected, and once shifted the tone of the summit from optimistic expectations for 6G to concerns about the uncertainty of 6G.
Coincidentally, at the French telecom giant Orange's recent Technology Open Day event in Paris, the company's chief technology officer Bruno Zerbib also publicly stated that interest in 6G technology is becoming more and more diluted, saying that users' experience of no difference from 4G to 5G is actually a warning that the entire communications industry has been trapped in the intergenerational paradigm of 2G, 3G, 4G, and 5G for too long, and he even believes that 5G may be the last G. There will be more and more operators who are not interested in repeating the 5G upgrade to 6G setting mode.
Therefore, as the world's largest 5G market, if Chinese operators can focus on commercial returns in the process of promoting 5G-A commercialization in the "second half" of 5G through innovative business models, it will undoubtedly point out the direction for global operators to get rid of the current business dilemma of 5G, and add confidence and impetus to the mobile communication industry to continue to promote the development of 6G in the future along the path of technology iteration.