The telco said it will cooperate with a number of partners from various industries in the 5G space
China Telecom said it expects to trial 5G networks in six cities across the Asian nation.“We are deeply devoted to engaging in 5G standard formulation and technology trial runs while proactively exploring and researching the networking plan for the evolution from 4G,” the service provider said in a statement.
“Field trials will be conducted in six cities and the joint research and development of…applications and solutions will be launched collaborating with cooperative partners from various industries.’
China Telecom is not likely to offer nationwide services in China once it commercially launches the new technology, Chinese press reported, citing the firm’s chairman and CEO Yan Jie.
Stressing it was his personal view, Yang said the business model for commercial service “will not be like 4G, 3G and 2G, where you have universal, comprehensive, seamless network coverage.”
The executive said that LTE and next generation technologies will certainly coexist for a long time. He also said that China Telecom is open to cooperate with rival telecoms operator China Mobile and China Unicom in terms of future infrastructure deployments.
China Telecom expects to launch commercial 5G services in 2020
In May, China completed planning of a 30-site 5G test field in Huairou district. The trial has been planned by the IMT-2020 (5G) Promotion Group.
China has started preparation early for next-generation networks, establishing the IMT-2020 (5G) Promotion Group in February 2013 to coordinate efforts by mobile service operators, manufacturers and research institutes. China aims to commercialize 5G mobile networks as early as 2020.
Operators participating in the IMT-2020 Promotion Group include China Mobile, China Telecom, China Unicom and Japanese telecoms operator NTT DoCoMo. Vendors which are part of the initiative are Huawei, ZTE, Ericsson, Nokia, Datang and Samsung. A number of chipset and test measurement vendors, including Qualcomm, Intel, Mediatek, Ctec, Keysight Technologies and Rohde & Schwartz are also part of the initiative.
China Telecom ended July with almost 233 million subscribers in the mobile telephony segment, of which 157 million use 4G technology. During the first seven months of the year, the Chinese telco added over 35 million 4G subscribers, according to the company’s latest available figures.
