China’s three major telecom operators will pilot 5G technology in several cities in the second half of 2017, state-run Xinhua news agency reported on Wednesday.
Citing sources from the telecom giants, China Mobile, China Unicom, and China Telecom, the state-run media reported, “The pilot projects will be carried out in several cities of China, including Beijing, Shanghai, Chongqing, Guangzhou, Nanjing, Suzhou, and Ningbo.”
The media reports suggested that the telecom giants will test the 5G technology, build base stations, and launch applications such as autonomous driving, smart cities, and smart homes based on the 5G network.
In the next phase, the pilot programmes will be expanded to another 10 or more cities in provinces including Jiangxi, Hainan, Shanxi, Shandong, Zhejiang, and Hebei.
The moves will help China play a leading role in developing the global 5G standard.
In addition to China, Japan, South Korea and the United Kingdom have all set targets of 2020 for the commercial launch of 5G services ─ a deadline which several experts term “ambitious”.
‘Pakistan will become first country in Asia to test 5G’
Minister of State for Information Technology and TeleÂcomÂmuÂnication Anusha Rahman said recently that Pakistan would become the first country in the region to test 5G technology.
She said the government would begin preparations for the introduction of 5G by 2021 and claimed that Pakistani people would adopt the new technology ahead of all other Asian countries.
She said that the number of broadband users in the country had increased from 3.7m to 44m over the past four years and now with the leap to 5G networks, “we can start to incompletely reshape entire industries, and rethink how we run our cities and manage critical national infrastructures”.
Although specialists are still undecided on what exactly 5G means, it is certain the technology will be a game-changer, enabling users to download large amounts of data within seconds.
5G speeds are expected to be one thousand times faster than current LTE data transfer speeds. China has even tested a prototype in this regard, with data transfer speeds of 3.5Gbps.
Furthermore, 5G services will be operating on a millimetre wave base.
