In November 2019, the three major operators launched 5G commercial in the first 50 cities. After that, there have been more and more criticisms of 5G, and continue to this day.
I believe you have seen similar views. Some people vent their emotions and say that the biggest killer applications of 5G cultivation are He and Huawei ;
also has some more rational analysis, saying that 5G technology is not yet mature, 5G application scenarios have not been found, and 4G can be satisfied in general scenarios, hastily invested hundreds of billions of dollars, causing huge waste, etc. It has been three years since the issuance of the 5G license and officially commercialized. I will try to answer many questions about 5G, and let readers have a clearer perspective and not be followed by others.
First talk about the most passionate doubts on the Internet. It is obvious that the 4G network speed is already fast enough to cope with all mobile phone scenarios. Why do we still have to force 5G?
Objectively speaking, the 4G network at this stage is indeed faster than before. After all, it is a mature technology that has been operating stably for ten years. The modulation accuracy has been improved from the 16th order to the 256th order. The theoretical rate has been increased from the previous 80-100Mbps to the peak of 150Mbps. There are also various black technologies, such as multi-node carrier aggregation, the mobile phone has built-in multi-antenna, and the theoretical rate of 4G can actually continue to rush up.
The speed gap between the two has not increased significantly compared to 5G, so it will make people feel that 4G and 5G are comparable.
But it should be noted that there is a big gap between the theoretical peak and the actual peak. It is difficult for 4G signals to reach the ideal 150Mbps peak. I believe everyone feels the same.
Some people say that 5G signals are also difficult to reach the peak of 472Mbps. This is true, but at least the daily rate is far beyond 4G signals. I hope you don’t have to doubt this.
According to the current average network speed announced nationwide, 5G downloads 341.20Mbps, uploads 71.98Mbps, 4G downloads 40.43Mbps, and uploads are 23.11Mbps.
Of course, for many people, the 4G signal speed is enough, and there is no need to go to a 5G package. But it should be noted that if you live in a relatively densely populated city, in some bustling business districts, you may encounter the dilemma of full 4G signal but no internet speed. Why is this happening to
?
There are comments that 5G squeezes out the bandwidth of 4G, but the frequency bands of 5G and 4G are completely different. The two are like high-speed rail and aircraft, and do not conflict with each other.
The fundamental reason is that the 4G standard is far from keeping up with the increasingly terrifying traffic demand, and the high load problem is very serious. Even if we continue to repair and repair, no matter how much the 4G speed is improved, no matter how dense the 4G base station is built, it cannot solve the traffic jam in the 4G frequency band, cannot solve the capacity problem of 4G channels, and hardware defects cannot be optimized and concealed through the software level.
In the past three years, 4G base stations have increased by about 200,000 per year, and the construction speed has tended to be slow, because the total number of 4G base stations has reached the terrible 6 million mark, which can be said to be completely covering the whole country and close to saturation.
continues to build 4G base stations intensively, but is just repeating the wheels. Although it can temporarily alleviate the problem of network traffic jams, it is only alleviating and cannot be cured.
If there is no 5G network to share traffic, the total traffic of the mobile Internet has almost doubled in recent years, the original 4G base station is simply useless. The average network speed may drop to several hundred k per second, and everyone is blocked in the same frequency band.
makes a simple metaphor. 4G is equivalent to an ordinary highway. Even if five or six ordinary highways are built, its natural speed limit problem cannot be solved well. If a 5G expressway is built, the vehicle congestion problem of 4G can be greatly diverted.
Now the number of 5G base stations is 2.1 million, accounting for 19.8% of the total number of mobile base stations. However, 5G base stations have already undertaken more than half of the national traffic. This is because 5G base stations have only been developed for three years and there is a lot of room for optimization in the future.
The reason why you think the current 4G network is okay and it is not stuck when used normally, it is entirely because the 5G network bears more traffic pressure and avoids congestion in the 4G frequency band.
Objectively speaking, the 5G technology a few years ago was indeed immature. Not only did the number of base stations and insufficient network coverage, but the 5G mobile phones consumed a lot of power and the network speed was not very impressive. In addition, the expensive packages were even more unwelcome.
But any technology has a gradual development process. Now, with the large-scale deployment of 5G base stations, the single cost will become lower and lower, and the total maintenance cost is almost the same as that of 4G base stations. Whether it is power consumption, channel capacity, , coverage capacity, and network access rate, the cost-effectiveness is completely higher than that of 4G base stations.
At least if you have a 5G phone in your hand, even if you use a 4G network, the network speed will be faster than the previous 4G phones.
There are also comments that before we find killer 5G applications, we should not deploy them on a large scale, but should first pilot them on a small scale, and pilot them on key areas such as Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen, school hospitals and stations.
It is now obvious that 4G networks cannot afford double the mobile Internet traffic. If it were not for the support of 5G networks, we would not have had the opportunity to discuss how much 5G is different from the peak speed of 4G today.
If it is not used on a large scale, how can it mature?
Only when the market is fully industrialized, with feedback from the market, and user feedback can killer applications be cultivated in this benign soil (with the opportunity), and problems such as high costs, unstable network speed, and poor coverage area of 5G base stations can be solved uniformly.
Most of the time, this kind of national project that determines the future requires the courage and cost of trial and error. Moreover, 5G is a mature technology that has been strictly proved by the whole world. You cannot naturally feel unreliable because this is "national 5G", and you think it is a success. You are ahead of time and then calculate various economic accounts, but ignore the most important communication security accounts, which leads to stagnation due to choking.
In addition, it should be noted that one of the important reasons for criticizing the large-scale deployment of 5G is that the coverage of 5G base stations is small, resulting in the number of them that must be ten times more than that of 4G base stations to achieve seamless switching. Therefore, if they are deployed nationwide, the construction cost will be greatly increased.
1 criticism is reasonable, so 5G commercialization was only launched in 50 cities in 2019, which is a small-scale trial and does not meet the conditions for large-scale laying. For example, in the wider rural areas, 5G coverage is far from enough and there is no ability to cover it.
Why can 5G base stations be deployed on a large scale now?
Because of the 700M spectrum, the problem of high construction costs is basically solved.
700MHz is called the "golden spectrum" because it has the advantages of wide coverage and moderate penetration. In the 700MHz band, the networking cost is low, the signal coverage is 2-3 times larger than the original 5G network, and the speed is much higher than that of the 4G network, with a downlink rate of 190mbps and an uplink rate of about 70mbps.
Although the download rate of 200Mbps is still a gap from the average 5G rate of 340Mbps, it is already enough to use it in rural areas at this stage.
Compared with 6 million 4G base stations, only 400,000 700MHz 5G base stations can easily cover the whole country, and the investment cost has dropped significantly.
In mid-2021, Mobile has built a total of 200,000 700MHz 5G base stations, and plans to build another 280,000 700M base stations in 2022.
So, for the discussion on "high cost of 5G base stations", the topic should be over when the 700MHz 5G base station was fully launched last year, but today it is still like a repeater, either never read the news or pay attention to the 5G industry trends, or it is simply bad.
When the country covers the most basic 700MHz base station, high-speed 5G base stations will be set up in key cities and business districts to allow the two to be parallel, which is the highest cost-effective choice.
According to the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, as of the end of July, my country's 5G mobile phone users reached 475 million, a net increase of 120 million from the end of last year. Currently, my country's 5G base stations basically cover all prefecture-level cities, county-level urban areas, and about 90% of townships and regions
It is undeniable that the killer application that really needs to use 5G may only be the network speed test software.
For ordinary individuals, the most obvious change in 5G at present is not the ushering in killer applications, but the lack of excessive lag and delay when watching high-definition videos and live broadcasts. The broadest prospect of
5G is still the industrial Internet, and the most likely large-scale application is the field of unmanned driving. Although it can only reach the L2 level at present and drivers are required to lead the driving of vehicles, low-latency communication between cars and urban transportation facilities is a real urgent need.
The previous 4G was not capable of autonomous driving in the field of autonomous driving. 5G can be boldly tried. Now the electric vehicle industry is also booming and mature enough.
As for other fields such as telemedicine, Internet of Things, AR/VR and Artificial Intelligence , there are more than 20,000 industry application cases, and it is still some time before full application, so this is not urgent.
And the premise for comprehensive application is that there must be a complete 5G network with a wide coverage. If you just say that, pilot it in a small range first, then there will be no future. If you continue to talk between the chicken and egg raw chicken, you will miss all the time.
Also what I want to say is that a big reason why many people criticize 5G is targeting Huawei, because when it comes to national 5G, it is patriotism, and when it comes to patriotism, it is boiling. Although I don’t understand what the logical chain is. Although there is indiscriminate slander in
, some of the remarks also point out Huawei's embarrassment and helplessness.
For example, Huawei needs to demonstrate the strong prospects of 5G networks so that it can promote its core base station business. However, because the United States forces the global industrial chain to take sides, the chips designed by Huawei cannot be produced by foundry, and cannot buy chips, RF, memory and screens. So the latest Mate50 series can only use 4G networks.
There is a contradiction here.
In order to successfully sell the phone, Huawei cannot say that the 4G signal is not as good as 5G, and even put various black technologies that enhance 4G signals into Mate50. It is not difficult for Huawei, which started out in communications.
Therefore, some digital bloggers have tested it in specific environments. The 4G signal of Mate50 is actually stronger than the 5G signal of iPhone13. It seems to be promoting the powerful signal of Mate50 in tap water, but in fact it has damaged Huawei's reputation for promoting 5G. The 4G mobile phone on the left and the 5G base station on the right are really in a dilemma.
There is also a very wide meme circulating on the Internet, that is, "4G+Hongmeng 5G", which has also become one of the classic examples of teasing Huawei.
is a joke, but this promotional picture did not appear in Huawei's direct store, nor in Huawei's authorized experience store. It is just a promotional privately posted in a hypermarket in Liqun Shopping Plaza, Jiaozhou City, Shandong Province. The official has also denied the rumors.
No matter what, Huawei has 5G patents and design capabilities, but it cannot produce the 5G version of Mate50. It is very passive in publicity and even needs to release a 5G mobile phone case to save the aircraft in a curve.
is only a personal evaluation. This 799 yuan scrubber shell is really not cost-effective...
There are also rumors that the Mate50 series' omni-channel order volume exceeded 4 million, tying the peak of the first sales of previous flagship phones. On the one hand, it proves the appeal of Huawei's brand, and on the other hand, it has been criticized by more people to prove the uselessness of 5G, because consumers are competing to use the 4G version and further question Huawei's 5G base station "make money".
This is also thanks to major marketing technology accounts. It often advocates that Huawei's 5G technology is 20 years ahead of Europe and the United States. It uses the words of Ren Zhengfei and Yu Dazui to play the national patriotism card. Especially the fan circles in the mobile phone circle are chaotic all year round. In various comment areas, it is said that buying Mate50 is a patriotic behavior, and buying an iPhone is a capital enemy behavior... The posture is very high, and the popularity of passers-by is naturally even worse.
Therefore, some time ago, when Huawei announced that it would promote 5.5G technology, it was a group of people in the entire network that they said that they were too ugly and started asking for funds again... But this time, I really wronged Huawei for it. Let me briefly talk about what 5.5G is.
5G technology requires continuous iteration and optimization, patching and upgrading. In the 5G standard planned by 3GPP, it is divided into two major stages:
first stage 5G evolution, including three versions R15/R16/R17;
second stage 5G evolution, that is, 5.5G, including three versions R18/R19/R20.
R15 is the most basic version of 5G, which needs to meet the requirements of enhancing mobile broadband, low latency and high reliability. The version was frozen in 2019; the
R16 version continues to be improved, improve power consumption, improve overall system, and expand to some vertical industries, such as the automotive field, the version was frozen in 2020; the
R17 version has added a large number of new technologies, such as satellite 5G network, new Internet of Things, dynamic spectrum sharing, various technology enhancements, etc. The version was frozen in 2022.
In other words, in just three years, 5G technology has iterated into three versions, and the latest R18 version means the second phase of 5G evolution, that is, 5.5G, which was launched at the end of this year and will be frozen in 2023. The commercial exploration of
5G can be done slowly, but technical iterations cannot tolerate any slackness.
If Huawei does not keep up with the crucial R18 version and does not seize the lead in the second stage of 5G, it will lag behind Europe and the United States in the competition for communication standards. Time can be said to be quite urgent, and no competitor will wait for Huawei to prepare for it. The second phase of the
5G standard will last until 2027. The real commercialization of 6G technology is estimated to be until 2032. It will be until 2038 (refer to 4G life span). The life span of 5G is still very long, far from what some people say is short 5G life span and is not worthy of large-scale investment.
Right, let’s talk about the development of 5G abroad. Statistics of
GSMA show that as of the first quarter of 2022, South Korea ranked first with 44.92% in terms of global 5G penetration rate, followed by mainland China (36.82%), Hong Kong China (29.62%), and Japan (25.49%).
According to GSMA, the global 5G connection number will reach 1 billion in 2022. From 2022 to 2025, operator capital expenditure will reach US$620 billion, of which 85% will be spent on 5G development.
communications equipment company Viavi Solutions released a report saying that as of the end of January 2022, the total number of cities deploying 5G in the world is close to the 2,000 mark.
In Europe, Middle East and Africa, there are a total of 839 cities deploying 5G technology , and the number of cities deploying 5G in the Asia-Pacific and Americas is 689 and 419 respectively.
If divided by country, China has 356 5G cities in the first place, followed by the United States (296) and the Philippines (98).
Then specifically to some countries:
UK's 3UK company announced at the end of May that its 5G service covers 54% of the UK population, and another operator, EE, also announced that its 5G network covers more than 50% of the population, a year earlier than expected, and promised to allow 5G network to cover all parts of the UK by 2028.
As of March this year, South Korea's 5G users were 22.9 million, accounting for 45%, making it one of the countries with the highest 5G usage rate in the world. It is expected that by the end of this year, the 5G coverage rate is expected to reach 93% of the total population.
The 5G user scale of the US operator T‐Mobile has covered 320 million people, which is 97% of the citizens; another operator, AT&T, has a total mobile user base of 203.373 million, with more than 70 million 5G users, and the penetration rate of exceeds 34%, which is expected to reach 100 million by the end of 2022.
It should be noted that the reason why T‐Mobile has so many 5G users is that it uses the low frequency band of 600MHz to build 5G base stations.
Because the transmission distance in the 600MHz band is very long and the coverage of 5G base stations is very wide, so as early as December 2019, the 5G coverage area of the entire United States reached 1 million square miles. I will directly take a promotional picture:
In other words, our current 5G base station construction speed is actually very conservative. In the early stage, it was only piloted in dozens of big cities. Later, it was not until the 700MHz 5G base station matured before it began to be fully laid, so that the vast majority of rural areas could also receive 5G signals.
Another point is that due to the lower frequency 600MHz, the average 5G download rate in the United States dropped to 93.73Mbps in 2021, with an upstream rate of 16.17Mbps, while China's 5G download rate is 341.20Mbps, and the upstream rate is 71.98Mbps... The network speed difference between the two countries is a bit large.
So some people joked that the scale of 5G users in the United States is forcibly transforming 4G users.
Of course, there is also "fraud" publicity in our domestic 5G sales. I often receive similar marketing text messages saying that I can enjoy 5GB of traffic at a low price, but the business processing interface is a 5G package. If you are not careful, you will upgrade to a 5G card. After the processing is successful, you will enjoy 5GB of traffic... Many people are disgusted by such routines. Not to mention
Not to mention, the big thing that people are currently complaining about 5G is that 5G packages are too expensive.
indeed.
In the 4G era, China's traffic expenses are relatively low in the world, with a fee of US$0.61 per 1GB, ranking rose from 165 in 2019 to 12th place, with the first place being India (US$0.09/GB), the most expensive one being St. Helena (US$52.50/GB), the United States is (US$8/GB), and Germany is (US$3.87/GB).
China Information and Communications Institute has sorted out data from GSMA. The monthly phone bill expenditure in major countries:
All of this is attributed to our policy of speeding up and reducing fees, which makes the three major operators dare not blatantly cheat on 4G packages, and can only clearly slap them on 5G packages. The 5G packages of the three operators basically start at 128 yuan, and few people can bear it.
At the World 5G Conference held on August 10, China Unicom Chairman said that in the first half of this year, China Mobile's traffic increased by 20.2% year-on-year, but traffic revenue increased by only 0.7% year-on-year, and China's traffic charge level was half that of foreign countries.
His conclusion is that the cost of 5G network construction and operation is growing rigidly, and 5G traffic charges cannot violate the rules and drop significantly. Although this is true, it cannot stand scrutiny.
Take American operators as an example. Verizon launched a 5G entry-level package with a monthly fee of US$30. If it is converted into RMB 202, it is indeed twice as expensive than domestic tariffs. AT&T's cheapest 5G package is even $65.
But the famous saying is to make US dollars and spend the RMB.The average salary of
3,000 US dollars, the monthly 5G package only costs US$30; the average salary of 3,000 RMB, the monthly 5G package costs RMB128, and the two cannot be confused.
It must be said that the 5G package in the United States is 202 yuan, which is very expensive. So please multiply the average salary of US$3,000 by 7, which is 21,000 yuan. Then, the 5G package with a monthly salary of 202 yuan is very relaxed.
Domestic 5G packages are expensive, which is an irrefutable fact.
In addition, all 5G packages in the United States have no traffic limit. The entry-level 5G package provides 50G unlimited traffic every month. The speed limit will not be limited after exceeding the usage threshold, but it can continue to be used without additional costs.
Looking at the 5G packages in South Korea, the Middle East, EU and other countries, one of their selling points is "unlimited traffic".
And all our domestic 5G packages range from 128 yuan to 599 yuan. No matter which level, the basic capacity is 30G-300G, and there is no "unlimited traffic".
Take the most expensive 599 yuan package as an example. It has 300G traffic per month, which seems to be a lot. However, the biggest feature of Huawei's 5.5G technology is now being promoted by it is the 10 Gigabit experience, that is, maintaining a download rate of 10Gbps/second.
Do you know what the concept of 10Gbps/second?
We download a 1.25G movie and can be downloaded in one second.
Domestic 5G packages are not unlimited traffic. With such a fast download rate, what's the point of encountering such a tight and stingy 5G package?
traffic charges cannot be reduced, everything is a silhouette.
You have to ask these operators why they dare to price like this, it is not because the country does not have a speed-up and fee reduction policy for 5G.
In order to maintain their fiber interest disks and to prevent the sharing of 5G packages from hotspots, these operators forcefully set traffic limits, so that they don’t cry and say that 5G is not profitable, and users are unwilling to use 5G.
At present, 5G users use such expensive 5G packages, which is real money and silver consumption, but the experience is not very good. The basic package of 128 yuan is equipped with 30G traffic. Since the food appearance is so ugly, don’t blame the majority of consumers for complaining about 5G. It’s better to use the 4G package back.
When can domestic 5G packages truly achieve "unlimited traffic" and open up traffic for everyone to use, so that consumers' psychological concerns can be completely put aside. The "5G useless theory" will disappear like the dust of history.
Finally I will summarize it.
5G is a must-fight for military strategists in the global communications field. If you want to not lose in this competition, you must apply it on a large scale. If you have always imagined that 5G technology will be kept in the laboratory, when will there be demand be released, and then a small-scale pilot will be conducted to calculate the economic accounts one by one. Don’t say whether there is enough soil to cultivate 5G killer applications, don’t say that the construction and operation costs of 5G base stations are spread across the board, and don’t expect any 6G and 7G technologies. Even the current increasingly rapid mobile Internet traffic and the overwhelmed 4G network cannot be perfectly resolved.
I am not optimistic about the birth of 5G killer applications in the civilian field in the 5G period. Please lower your imagination about 5G technology. At this stage, it can completely replace 4G networks, increase the average downlink rate to 200-300Mbps, truly support 4k and 8k ultra-definition videos, and effectively improve the productivity in the industrial field.
, you need to go step by step, eat a little bit of food, and I also hope that practitioners will lose less gimmick marketing and consumers will be more calm and composed.
Looking back on the past, from 3G standards to WAPI, from Beidou system to C919, many ethnic projects that cannot generate economic benefits in a short period of time will suffer similar doubts, which is normal, and the wheel of history will eventually prove everything.
