New | China to roll out 5G broadband mobile equipment trials across 100 cities

China, home to three of the world’s largest mobile network operators, has started conducting trials of so-called 5G telecommunications equipment that will span more than 100 cities, as it aims to get a head start in the race to lead the next generation of cellular phone systems.

High-speed 5G networks can theoretically transmit data 20 times faster than current 4G speed, with less than one tenth of the latency, or the time for a data request to receive a reply. The 5G technologies being tested include massive multiple-antenna systems capable of handling more users and increased capacity to support greater mobile data usage, according to Bernstein Research.

China, with the world’s largest 4G market at 1.3 billion users at the end of 2015, is the only country with sufficient scale to “make or break” a new global 5G standard, something industry leaders say is necessary to optimise the efficiency of the technology when it becomes widely used, said Bernstein’s senior analyst Chris Lane.

“We believe ‘China Inc’ has a strong vested interest in ensuring a significant amount of Chinese technology is embedded in the [5G] standard - finally freeing them of their dependency on foreign technology and the need to pay royalties,” Lane said in a report.

Almost 30 per cent of China’s 1.3 billion mobile phone users are on 4G networks, according to the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT), which regulates the sector.

High-speed 5G networks can achieve theoretical speeds at up to 20 gigabits per second, much faster than the current fourth generation speed of 1 Gbps . Latency, or the time required for a request for data to receive a reply when clicking an app, is envisioned to be 1 millisecond or less on 5G, compared with 10 ms on 4G.

The International Telecommunications Union, part of the United Nations, expects network deployments to begin in 2020 soon after the standards are set for 5G, technically known as IMT-2020.