At this stage 5G technology is immature and high operating costs

On October 14, H company executive director and operator BG Ding also stated at the 2020 China International Information and Communication Exhibition that China has built the world’s largest 5G network, but in terms of user experience, coverage, and commercial closed-loop There is still a gap between Shanghai and foreign countries. Compared with the high coverage and high praise of 4G commercial use in one year,

's achievements in the first anniversary of 5G commercial use are lacklustre. The root cause is that 5G itself is a business concept, not a technological upgrade. The government and operators are led by individual manufacturers. The result of investing heavily in immature technology will inevitably bring about problems such as "extremely high operating costs" and "difficult costs".

Some officials and scholars hold a conservative attitude towards 5G at this stage.

Although public opinion is enthusiastic about 5G at this stage, a celebrity entrepreneur also said that “the United States will be called a backward country after 5G applications.” However, there are also some officials, experts and scholars. At the stage 5G is conservative.

Not long ago, Lou Jiwei, the former minister of the Ministry of Finance of , said that it is necessary for the infrastructure to be moderately advanced, but in some respects it is too advanced, has raised user costs or unsustainable public sector debt. The existing 5G technology is very immature, hundreds of billions of investment have been deployed, and the operating cost is extremely high, no application scenarios can be found, and it will be a problem to digest the cost in the future.

On September 20, 2019, the then Minister of Industry and Information Technology Miao Wei stated at a press conference of the State Council Information Office that he has not yet used a 5G mobile phone. He said that for the majority of users, 4G mobile phones are sufficient for .

Wei Leping, deputy director of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology Standing Committee of Communications Technology and director of the China Telecom Science and Technology Committee, pointed out in his speech that the real large-scale commercialization of 5G still has a long way to go. Wei Leping believes that this time period will be 2021-2027. The 100,000 macro base stations currently deployed by have high power consumption and poor capacity. may soon be eliminated by in the future. This is equivalent to throwing away more than 30 billion RMB .

At the press conference of the State Information Office on April 23, 2019, Wen Ku, spokesperson for the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and Director of the Information and Communication Development Department pointed out that the topic of 5G has been very hot recently and everyone is paying attention. "Recently, everyone has seen some news and reports from various news media. For example, the first call is made in a certain place, and there is an opening in a certain place. Here I want to say that these are just the fact that 5G has just taken off. A small step. We will find in our work that 5G now everyone feels difficult .”

Professor Cai Yigang believes that domestic 5G reports are mostly false. Professor Cai has 722 approved international invention patents and is a senior researcher at Bell Labs. He presided over the conceptual design and system development of 3G, 4G and 5G network systems and application products. He has won the "Bell Labs Inventor Award" three times.

At the 2019 Global Smart Logistics Summit, Wang Jianzhou, the former chairman of China Mobile, said that at present, due to the lack of special applications for mobile phones, the main application of who uses 5G mobile phones is: speed measurement. "Everyone is comparing it. Look at the speed I measured."

It can be said that 5G at this stage does not have the "air every second, every second, every second" in media reports. From the above-mentioned officials, experts and scholars, it has been able to There are some problems with 5G at the stage of refraction. It can be said that the above statement is completely contrary to the previous statements made by large companies and the media. After repeated hype by European and American politicians, large companies, and the media, 5G has become the "technical commanding height" and the "extraterrestrial technology" that determines the destiny of the country in public opinion. Individual star entrepreneurs also claimed that "5G changes society". "The United States will become a backward country after 5G applications." But in fact, the current 5G technology is immature.

5G has no but revolutionary technology. It is just a business concept

. As far as the 5G EMBB scenario is concerned, the standard has been formulated.

First modulating this piece has not changed. It's too basic, and I can't change it even if I want to change it.

As far as coding is concerned, although the coding has been hyped by the media, LDPC and Polar have very limited improvements over Turbo. It is true that LDPC and Polar are milestone technologies in the development of communication technology after Turbo codes. But because of TurbThe o code is closer to the Shannon limit. Although these two codes are closer, the increase in system capacity is not large, about 1 to 2%. In the area of ​​

multiple access, eMBB, one of the three major 5G scenarios, has not changed, and 4G OFDM is still used. The multi-access piece of NOMA has a lot of enthusiasm and was once recognized as a necessary technology for 5G. In the early days of the 5G standard, almost all manufacturers supported this direction. However, it has been verified that NOMA's gain is strictly zero compared to OFDM, so it returns to OFDM in the 4G era. In terms of

networking, CoMP has been proved to be zero gain by operators. The loudest part of the

multi-antenna is massive MIMO, which claims to be able to increase the system capacity by a hundredfold, which is almost synonymous with 5G from the media. The theory of

MIMO was proposed in 1995, and it has been 23 years. The huge increase in capacity revealed by it has made it a hot spot in academia and industry. But this technology has not been very successful until 4G. The problem with MIMO is that although the capacity can be increased, the power consumption will also skyrocket if the equipment is costly.

Overall, 5G has almost no technological progress compared to 4G. In addition, because 5G is taking the route of high-frequency expansion—the bandwidth consumed is doubled, and bandwidth resources are very precious at low frequencies. Therefore, you can only choose mid-high frequencies with richer spectrum resources. The higher the frequency, the smaller the coverage, which is the basic knowledge of wireless communication. This will lead to a substantial increase in the cost of networking.

So from a technical point of view, 5G has no revolutionary technology than 4G, and the cost will be higher.

At this stage, 5G technology relies on violent stacking to increase network speed.

At this stage, 5G is taking the route of high-frequency expansion. Its performance is based on large bandwidth, MIMO antennas, high-performance chips and other violent stacks. It is more efficient than 4G. Can't promote. The violent stacking of materials has caused power consumption problems. Therefore, some manufacturers have put forward low-frequency 5G solutions to reduce power consumption by castration. But this brings another problem, that is, the speed of this low-frequency 5G solution is almost the same as that of 4G. Compared with the bandwidth of about 500 megabytes in the intermediate frequency and the bandwidth of more than 1000 megabytes in the high frequency, the low frequency bandwidth is only tens of megabytes, which is similar to the 4G bandwidth, and the antenna is basically 4G specifications. This kind of castration in order to reduce costs and adapt to 700Mhz has led to the 5G performance of castration being similar to 4G.

From a practical point of view, the radio and television deployed this low-cost, low-power networking mode at 700M low frequency, which consumes 40M bandwidth, and the theoretical downlink speed is 220-440Mbps. In the case of Ericsson with a bandwidth of 20MHz and 2T2R, the measured download rate of the 5G terminal is 163Mbps.

China Radio and Television and H opened the country's first 5G base station based on 700M 2×30M spectrum bandwidth, which can achieve a 5G network downlink speed of 300Mbps.

As a reference, the early 4G Cat 4 standard theoretical downlink speed is 150Mbps, 4G Cat 6 standard theoretical downlink speed is 300Mbps, 4G Cat 12, Cat 13 standard theoretical downlink speed is 600Mbps, Unicom 4G measured speed in Xiong'an Reach 1.2Gbps.

That is to say, the low-frequency 5G of broadcasting and television is equivalent to repeating the construction of a full-blooded version of 4G Cat 6. Although is stronger than the castrated version of 4G currently used by everyone, it is not compared with the 4G network speed of South Korea and Hong Kong How many advantages are at a disadvantage compared to Xiongan's 4G.

It can be said that 5G technology at this stage is immature and very embarrassing. The high-frequency expansion route will cause huge power consumption, coverage, and cost issues. Although the low-frequency 5G solution can reduce power consumption and improve coverage, it is almost the same as the 4G network speed, which is equivalent to repeating the construction of a 4G network.

Due to the current public opinion environment, although the test data released by operators has revealed the true level of 5G at this stage, after media and corporate hype, many netizens tend to classify normal views as conspiracy theories. This is not true. normal phenomenon.

If the 5G base station reaches the 4G coverage level, the electricity bill will be 1.5 times the profit of the three major operators.

Although the media and enterprises blow 5G to the sky,According to the data released by operators, 5G still has some shortcomings, among which the biggest shortcomings are power consumption, cost and coverage. In terms of coverage, the current coverage of 5G (intermediate frequency) base stations is only 200 to 300 meters. Due to poor coverage, some communication manufacturers call for clearing 2G and 3G spectrum and deploying 5G at low frequencies to improve coverage.

In terms of cost, the current 5G base station is 3 times that of the 4G base station.

In terms of power consumption, 5G base stations are about 3 times the power consumption of 4G base stations. Yang Jie, chairman of China Mobile, stated at the GTI International Industry Summit, "The current price of 5G base stations is twice that of 4G base stations, and the power consumption is about 2.5-3 times."

Yang Fengyi, deputy director of China Telecom Technology Innovation Center, pointed out that the typical power consumption of 5G base stations is about 3,500 watts. Under the same coverage target, the number of 5G base stations will reach 3-4 times that of 4G, so the overall energy consumption of 5G mobile networks will be more than 9 times that of 4G.

According to data released by operators, a standard 4G base station consumes about 900W to 1000W at full load, while 5G base stations reach 3600W to 3800W. Doubled power consumption leads to doubled electricity bills. According to Yang Fengyi, deputy director of China Telecom Technology Innovation Center, “The overall energy consumption of 5G mobile networks will be 9 times that of 4G”. To achieve the same coverage, the overall energy consumption of 5G networks will be Will be more than 9 times the 4G network.

Yang Fengyi said that in 2018, the mobile base stations of the three operators consumed a total of about 27 billion kWh, and the total electricity bill was about 24 billion. “Under the same coverage, the energy consumption of the 5G network will reach 243 billion kWh. It will reach 216 billion yuan.”

According to the 2019 financial report, the total revenue of the three major operators is 1.4 trillion yuan and the total profit is 138.4 billion yuan. In other words, the power consumption of the 5G base station will reach 1.5 times the total profit of the three major operators.

is precisely because the 5G technology itself is weak, it is just a business concept, and it is in sharp contrast with 4G. After the first anniversary of 5G commercial use, four major issues of cost, power consumption, coverage, and application have been exposed. China Unicom has also engaged in 5G base station intelligent sleep to reduce costs, and promotion is completely dependent on political tasks. When 4G is commercially available, operators are highly motivated and have achieved coverage within one to two years.

Unicom's 5G base station sleeps regularly to reduce operation and maintenance costs.

Recently, due to the economic impact of the general environment and the post-epidemic era, vigorous 5G base station construction projects have been staged across the country. In practice, although equipment vendors have made a lot of money, the current 5G technology has not changed society, but has overwhelmed individual operators. China Unicom has also announced that it will adopt a new way to save power consumption of 5G base stations. The 5G base station sleeps in a period of time, and China Unicom will intelligently shut down the 5G base station according to the actual 5G base station load during the daily (21:00-9:00 of the next day). The root cause of this situation is the immaturity of 5G technology at this stage, which indicates that the 5G violent stockpiling program has not passed the test of practice.

Unicom did this mainly because 5G power consumption is too large and operation and maintenance costs are too high.

According to the field trial data of China Unicom in Luoyang, after the AAU deep sleep function is turned on at all times under no load, a single A9611 model AAU will save about 6.09 yuan in electricity per day, and a single A96331A model will save about 5.61 in electricity per day. A single A9622A model AAU will save 3.11 yuan in electricity bills per day.

is calculated by configuring 3 AUUs for a 5G base station. On average, each base station can save 15 yuan per day. The current 200,000 base stations can save 3 million yuan per day, which can save nearly 1.2 billion yuan a year. If calculated based on the construction volume of 1 million 5G base stations, China Unicom can save 6 billion in electricity bills a year. According to Unicom's 2019 financial report, the annual profit was 11.3 billion, and the electricity savings could reach 53% of the annual profit.

From these data, we can see why China Unicom has to engage in 5G base stations to sleep regularly.

5G killer applications need to be explored. The so-called 1 millisecond delay of

5G is also an art, the so-called millisecond delay here is just air interface delay. Generally, the optical fiber has 5ms for one or two thousand kilometers, and the response time of the entire system is less than 1 millisecond. For workFor industrial applications, the most reliable is the wired network. In the future industrial applications, wired, WIFI6, and 5G have application scenarios, and considering the reliability, stability and low cost of wired networks, it is very likely that the future will still be based on wired networks, supplemented by WIFI6 and 5G (current wired networks) It accounts for more than 97% of industrial applications). The killer application of

5G remains to be explored. A large number of 5G concepts are gimmicks, the so-called four categories of applications, 13 scenarios, many scenarios have been repeatedly fried rice in the past ten years. Concepts such as telemedicine have been hyped since the 3G era. It was nothing more than a hype in the 4G era, and continued hype in the 5G era.

Regarding the hype of 5G telemedicine, an industry insider commented: After reading this propaganda for many years, I almost vomited. I can’t help it. I vomit: 1) The transmission of electrical signals for 3000 kilometers requires 10ms, air interface 1ms is really not a problem. 2) According to different resolutions, the encoding and decoding time of a video image is much longer than the communication transmission time. 3) This kind of near-static low-speed operation is 1mm/s, and the error caused by the transmission delay of tens of ms is almost negligible, mainly due to the delay of video coding and decoding and the response time of the remote actuator to the remote command.

As Lou Jiwei said, hundreds of billions of investment has been deployed, and the operating costs are extremely high, and application scenarios are not found. In the future, it will be difficult to digest costs. Lou’s public statement has shown that the superiors understand what 5G is at the current stage, and at this stage 5G’s problems in power consumption, cost, coverage, and applications cannot be solved in the short term. Some industry insiders commented that the construction of 5G base stations is likely to stay at the scale of 1 million stations. Before the four major issues of power consumption, cost, coverage and application are solved, they will not expand blindly.

5G development should be realistic and gradual

my country’s 4G construction has experienced 7 years of investment from 2013 to now, and tens of millions of 4G network construction investment has not been fully recovered. The 5G investment cycle will only be longer than 4G, and the four major Russian operators also said , 5G cost is too high, 20 years may not be able to recover the cost.

At present, the large-scale construction of 5G will only increase the burden on operators, and increase the monthly rent of telephone bills and increase the burden on consumers. A few manufacturers can use kidnapping policies to turn operators into their own cash cows, and then collect them from consumers. 5G tax". From the data point of view, the ARPU value of 5G users in South Korea has increased by 37% compared to 4G. After the start of 5G construction, domestic operators have reduced 4G network speeds on the one hand, and cancelled 4G unlimited data packages on the other hand and started to increase ARPU.

As Lou Jiwei said, the existing 5G technology of is very immature. The large-scale promotion of this immature technology is almost a replica of Star Wars. It has spent hundreds of billions to build an immature and lacking application communication network. , A small number of manufacturers benefited greatly, and users paid for it.

As far as the actual user experience is concerned, due to the close coverage of 5G, the signal is easily affected by external factors. Only a few urban areas have good coverage. In cities like Hangzhou, 5G coverage is not feasible in many places. A netizen said that a 5G mobile phone will automatically connect to 5G, the mobile phone displays a weak 5G signal, and the network speed is very slow. The old mobile phone uses a 4G network to open a web page or APP smoothly. After changing to a 5G mobile phone, the card will be messed up. You can't turn off 5G and use 4G network. As a result, you can use your mobile phone daily. After changing your 5G mobile phone, you can only watch other people's mobile phone.

In fact, the current 5G network speed can also be done with 4G carrier aggregation, and the 4G network speed of Hong Kong Mobile is not much different from that of 5G. According to Ding, the managing director of Company H, the average 5G rate of in my country is only 270Mbps. In contrast, the average download speed of 4G tested by Korean institutions is 158.53 Mbps.

We can completely build 5G perfect technology on a small scale. On the other hand, upgrade 4G to reach the current level of 5G. Some third world countries that are not rich in economy do this, but this approach is relatively cost-effective and saves money. Some manufacturers cannot make as much money as promoting 5G, so they are not chosen by interest groups.

Under the background of the current emphasizing saving (CD-ROM), should make more careful calculations and save money. cannot spend money like in the past. So there are industry playersAnalysis, 5G base station construction will stay at 1 million stations.

At present, there are two problems with 5G technology:

is the immature technology, and there are three major problems of coverage, power consumption, and cost.

The second is the lack of killer applications, making 5G useless.

In the current 5G hype, 5G power consumption is indeed a dead knot, no matter when the huge investment in the transformation of 5G equipment and power and other auxiliary facilities can recover the cost. One aspect of light power consumption is a headache for operators. If the monthly package is too high, it will scare away potential 5G users. The monthly package fee will be less, and enterprises have to chase for profit. The state can give some subsidies, but subsidies are limited after all. From the perspective of application, 5G network construction at this stage still replicates the 4G experience of serving consumer users. Z8z pursues large-scale one-time continuous coverage, which is equivalent to operators giving blood transfusions to specific equipment vendors, and increasing investment to boost GDP in a short time. The market consequences are inevitably low user utilization, equipment idling, and high operation and maintenance costs. After the deterioration of the financial situation of operators, the problem will inevitably be passed on to downstream suppliers, which will intensify vicious competition in the industry and damage the long-term healthy development of the communications industry.

At present, the solution should be based on seeking truth from facts, acknowledging the shortcomings of 5G at this stage, instead of advocating “5G every second, every second, every second,” and developing 5G step by step. On the one hand,

will pilot 5G in small-scale steps in specific industries (To B) or specific areas (high-density stations, complexes, etc.) in accordance with the needs of , and make improvements in the pilot to achieve a spiral increase. On the other hand,

upgraded the 4G base station, and carried out carrier aggregation to increase the 4G network speed to 1.2Gbps.

When 5G achieves a technological breakthrough, solves the four major problems of coverage, power consumption, cost, and application, and then conducts large-scale construction.