China Mobile, the world’s largest operator in terms of subscribers, added a total of 28.7 million 5G subscribers in June, according to the carrier’s latest available figures.
The operator said it ended last month with 250.69 million 5G subscribers, compared to 70.2 million 5G customers in June 2020.
China Mobile’s overall mobile subscriber base at the end of June amounted to 945.5 million, up compared to 942.8 million in the previous month.
Rival operator China Unicom said it added a total of 7.23 million 5G subscribers during June. The telco ended June with 113.33 million 5G subscribers, up from 106.1 million the previous month. China Unicom started to provide 5G statistics earlier this year.
China Unicom reported an overall mobile base of with 310.4 million subscribers at the end of June, up from 309.5 million in June 2020.
Meanwhile, China Telecom added 6.66 million 5G subscribers in June to take its total 5G subscribers base to 131.5 million.
China Telecom’s overall mobile base amounted to 362.49 million subscribers at the end of the May, after adding 1.82 million customers during the month.
The country’s three major mobile carriers have already activated 961,000 5G base stations and connected 365 million 5G-compatible devices by end-June, Chinese press reported, citing comments by press secretary for the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology Tian Yulong.
According to recent press reports, China Broadcast Network and China Mobile have recently completed a tender to deploy 400,000 5G base stations this year, as part of the companies’ efforts to launch a shared 5G network. The contracts had been won by Huawei, ZTE, Datang, Nokia and Ericsson.
The two companies expect this shared network to reach nationwide coverage within the next two years.
China Broadcasting Network was established in October 2020 in Beijing, becoming the country’s fourth mobile operator.
Earlier this year, Liu Liehong, vice minister of industry and information technology, had said that 5G Standalone networks covered all prefecture-level cities across China.
The ministry also estimated 5G mobile phone shipments in China would account for 80% of the total shipments in the second half of this year.
China is forecast to reach 739 million 5G subscribers by 2025, according to a recent study by ABI Research. This figure would represent nearly 40% of the global market share in the 5G segment.
In terms of the annual mobile data consumption, the 5G annual data traffic in China is forecast to reach 782 exabytes by 2025, representing a share of nearly 60% of the world’s total 5G data consumption.
