China telecom firms steer 5G

Big 3 telecoms boast larger database, markets

China has played a key role in setting the faster standards for 5th-generation (5G) mobile networks and wireless systems thanks to its burgeoning telecommunications market and gigantic user database, experts told the Global Times on Friday.

Hardware specifications for the Non-Standalone 5G New Radio standards were ratified at a meeting of the third Generation Partnership Project group in Portugal, US-based wireless communications news website fiercewireless.com reported on Wednesday.

China’s three big operators – China Mobile, China Unicom and China Telecom – are members of the group and China Mobile leads a 5G research project, the Beijing Morning Post reported on Friday.

China has a gradually increasing say in the telecom standards that will form the basis of commercial 5G products, telecom expert Xiang Ligang told the Global Times on Friday. “Whoever has a say in the standards has a say in the market,” he said.

Faster 5G speed will slash 4G download latency. The new standards result from discussions among major global telecommunication companies, Xiang noted, “but in the past, China had little discourse power in those discussions.”

When 1G standards were first set, most of the standards were set by the US, he explained.

“Later European and Japanese companies joined the competition for 2G standards and at that time, all China could do was to decide which side to support,” he said.

When China invented its own TD-SCDMA telecommunications standard, it was the “turning point for domestic brands to start gaining the upper hand over overseas firms in the domestic mobile phone market,” Xiang said.

After TD-SCDMA, overseas com- panies gradually started to take the Chinese standard into consideration when setting 3G and 4G standards.

“Now for 5G, Chinese companies can decide more than half of the standards,” Xiang said.

The increasing power results from the increasing competence and business scale of Chinese telecommunication companies and hardware manufacturers like Huawei Technologies, said Liu Xingliang, head of the Data Center of China Internet.

“This is also a reward for those companies’ strong investment in technological research,” Liu told the Global Times on Friday.

China’s bigger say would also boost China’s competitiveness in the global telecommunications market, he noted.

“If Chinese companies can decide the standards, they can produce phones that meet those standards earlier than overseas competitors,” he said.