PRESS RELEASE: The fourth 5G Gigabit Network Industry Forum sponsored by the TD Industry Alliance (TDIA) was held in Beijing on June 4, 2023, with the theme of “comprehensively demonstrating the 5G gigabit network progress and achievements and accelerating the high-quality development of industries”. At the forum, QI BI, Chief Expert of China Telecom, Bell Labs Fellow, and IEEE Fellow, delivered a keynote speech titled “Build High-Quality 5G Networks for an Intelligent Digital China”.

In his speech, BI said that China’s national development plan for 2021 to 2025 clearly highlights the importance of a secure and controllable digital infrastructure to empowering China’s digital transformation. China Telecom is unswervingly committed to its national mission and has built itself into a service-, security-, and technology-oriented enterprise. Based on cloud-network synergy and digital transformation, it has deployed comprehensive intelligent information services to promote high-quality development and support the construction of a smart society and digital China.

Leading 5G networks are a prerequisite of a digital foundation. To that end, China Telecom released a 5G technical white paper and took the lead in determining the development direction and target architecture of 5G SA as early as 2018. To date, it has built the world’s largest 5G SA co-construction and sharing network, with over one million base stations and 250 million 5G users. In terms of 5G technology innovation, it led the innovation of the “Super” series solutions from 2019 to 2022 to continuously enrich 5G capabilities and has greatly contributed to the development of the industry as a whole.

Low-, Mid-, and High-Band Coordinated Networking Enables an Ultimate 5G Experience

BI remarked that China Telecom is always striving to build high-quality 5G networks by leveraging multi-band coordination such as 3.5 GHz + 2.1 GHz + 800 MHz to create the ultimate user experience.

An ultra-high-speed experience layer is built based on the high bandwidth of 3.5 GHz to achieve a live-network application experience of over 3 Gbps, which provides a great foundation for gigabit services. In addition, 2.1 GHz + 1.8 GHz dual mid-bands are utilized to build the world’s largest FDD network, which ensures good indoor and rural coverage.

China Telecom now has more than 46.97 million live-network VoNR new calling users and its number of IoT users has surpassed 400 million. Low bands should be fully utilized to provide the basic coverage layer for voice and IoT services, ensuring ubiquitous coverage for VoNR new calling and RedCap new IoT services.

Currently, China Telecom has built 5G digital cities through FDD + TDD dual-layer networking. The 3.5 GHz Massive MIMO solution is used to promote dual-gigabit city construction and provide ultimate energy efficiency for networks. On top of that, the 2.1 GHz 8T8R technology is deployed on a large scale to provide ubiquitous high-quality user experiences.

China Telecom is committed to continuously pursuing technological breakthroughs. On May 17 of this year, it launched the first 5G-Advanced city in Shenzhen and plans to build six 5.5G demonstration zones to spearhead network development and help comprehensively upgrade key applications in industries such as energy, manufacturing, port, transportation, and healthcare.

China Telecom not only achieves high-quality ubiquitous gigabit experience by improving urban digital infrastructure capabilities, but also comprehensively promotes information-based rural development and all-scenario 5G connections. It is also piloting innovative 5G solutions to improve the video-viewing and call-making experience of passengers on high-speed trains.

China Telecom is also engaged in the work of expanding 5G coverage from land to sea, a successful example of this being the deployment of marine 5G networks based on 2.1 GHz 8T8R along Zhangzhou’s 715 km coastline. The networks enable seamless 5G coverage in coastal and open sea areas of Zhangzhou to support application scenarios that include marine fisheries and monitoring, and emergency rescue, thereby promoting the development of the ocean economy and safeguarding marine safety and interests.

Green network development is also indispensable for operators’ transformation. Under the guidance of China’s 2030 carbon peak and 2060 carbon neutrality goals, China Telecom has proposed its own “1248 dual-carbon strategy”. Specifically, it internally reduces costs and increases efficiency to drive new revenue growth, and externally provides support for the digital economy and enables green transformation.

BI highlighted that in terms of green 5G, China Telecom’s co-construction and sharing of 5G base stations reduces carbon emissions by more than 10 million tons each year; its AI energy-saving platform covers nearly 4 million sectors and reduces energy consumption by more than 15%; the innovative pilot solution that integrates site solar access and PV energy storage reduces electricity costs by over 40%; and related actions and solutions continuously strengthen green digital infrastructure networks.

Prospective Layout of Cloud Networks Empowers Digital China

To promote the development of the digital economy, China Telecom proactively builds new 5G information infrastructure based on cloud-network synergy, strengthens the prospective layout of cloud network resources, promotes the digital transformation of production, lifestyle, and social governance, and enables digital and intelligent upgrade of various industries on the cloud.
According to BI, China Telecom has launched more than 6,000 customized 5G network projects and nearly 20,000 commercial 5G industry projects, allowing it to amass a wide selection of industry experience in the smart mining, smart factory, and smart city fields. Its projects also include those in education, healthcare, culture and tourism, and sport in order to provide smart life services for the general public.

Examples of China Telecom successful 5G projects include the building of a global 5G fully-connected factory with Midea and China Telecom Gansu’s provincial smart healthcare project, which has helped the Gansu Provincial Hospital carry out China’s first remote gastric cancer surgery through the use of 5G controlled robots. The solution has also helped the hospital transform medical diagnosis and treatment and allow more high-quality resources to be shared. China Telecom Zhejiang also uses frequency aggregation technology to flexibly combine uplink and downlink spectrum resources, which helps reduce investment costs.

BI also pointed out that China Telecom will continue to improve its 5G capabilities. In the ToC sector, air interface selection based on AI and cross-band algorithms will be used to enable an ultimate experience network with in-depth resource convergence, meeting higher service requirements in terms of rate, latency, reliability, and energy consumption. In the ToB sector, the innovation of efficient and optimized multi-band convergence control will improve spectral efficiency by more than 10% and enhance NB-IoT capabilities to meet the uplink capacity, coverage, latency, and reliability requirements of multiple services and scenarios, such as waterways, drones, telemedicine, and smart policing.

China Telecom will continue to play the leading role in the realization of the digital China initiative, and work with all industry parties to build higher-quality 5G networks. On the network side, it will work with equipment vendors to guide the evolution of multi-antenna technology, and utilize multi-antenna arrays, spatial multiplexing, and multi-layer multiplexing to continuously improve spectral efficiency. China Telecom will also focus on innovation in spectrum convergence. In terms of terminals, 3GPP Release 18 will gradually incorporate multi-antenna reception capabilities such as 4R, 6R, and 8R, as well as type-2 codebooks. As for services, the development of new calling, new video, and new IoT services will be accelerated to enrich consumers’ lives and enable more comprehensive applications.

“In a race with a thousand ships, only the toughest sailor can win,” concluded BI in his closing remarks. In the pursuit of high-quality 5G development, China Telecom will work hard with industry partners to empower a 5G digital market worth tens of trillions yuan and drive the growth of the digital economy.