China Mobile said the trial is part of the plan to launch commercial 5G in 2020
China Mobile, the world’s largest mobile operator, announced plans to deploy 100 5G-ready base stations in Shanghai later this year as part of its plans to launch commercial 5G services in China in 2020.
“The company has already built two 5G base stations in Shanghai as well as a 5G lab to explore possible commercial applications with its partners,” Chinese press quoted Yan Jun, general manager of the planning and development department of China Mobile in Shanghai, as saying.
In March this year, China Mobile announced plans to build what it claimed to be the world’s largest 5G trial network. The operator said it will start 5G trials in five Chinese cities this year. The company will conduct outdoor field tests in Hangzhou, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Suzhou and Wuhan.
The telco plans to deploy small-scale “apps demonstration” trials in a dozen other cities, including Beijing and Shenzhen. According to Liu Guangyi, CTO for terminal and wireless technology at China Mobile Research Institution, the trial networks will mostly run in the 3.5 GHz band.
Last year, the Chinese telco had announced plans to deploy more than 10,000 5G base stations by 2020. The carrier also said that it expects to launch a pre-commercial 5G service in 2018.
Earlier this month, the government of China has given the green light to Chinese telecom operators to test 5G technology in major cities across the country.
China Unicom announced plans to trial 5G in 16 cities including Beijing, Tianjin, Qingdao, Hangzhou, Nanjing, Wuhan, Guiyang, Chengdu, Shenzhen, Fuzhou, Zhengzhou, and Shenyang.
China Telecom will start testing 5G technology in six cities including Xiong’an, Shenzhen, Shanghai, Suzhou, Chengdu and Lanzhou.
The government of China has already kicked off the third phase of its own 5G trials. The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology said the third phase of 5G technical tests aims to get pre-commercial 5G products ready by mid-2018.
In September, the second phase of tests on the 5G network’s wireless portion concluded. Telecom companies have met the key performance requirements set up by the International Telecommunication Union, such as the peak rates of data speed. Vendors including Huawei, ZTE, Ericsson and Nokia as well as local mobile operators China Mobile, China Unicom and China Telecom participated in this phase of China’s 5G tests.
In April, Chinese vendor Huawei said it became the first vendor to pass China’s 5G non-standalone (NSA) core network test, which covers key core network technologies and service processes and marks the third phase of the country’s 5G R&D trial.
The 5G trial was organized by the IMT-2020 (5G) promotion group and conducted at the Beijing lab of the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology (CAICT).
Huawei said the test is based on the commercial 5G core network solution released by Huawei at the Mobile World Congress 2018, which took place in Barcelona earlier this year.
