China Mobile, the world’s largest operator in terms of subscribers, added 15.6 million 5G subscribers in March.
The operator said it ended March with a total of 188.76 million 5G subscribers, compared to 31.72 million 5G customers in March 2020.
China Mobile’s overall mobile subscriber base was reported as 939.6 million at the end of March, down compared to 937.2 million in February.
The Chinese operator has already deployed over 385,000 5G base stations nationwide, according to recent press reports. Yang Jie, chairman of China Mobile, reportedly said that the carrier finished its annual 5G network build-out target ahead of schedule and has built the world’s largest 5G SA network.
Also, China Unicom added a total of 7.3 million 5G subscribers during March.
The telco ended March with 91.85 million 5G subscribers, up from 84.54 million the previous month. China Unicom started to inform 5G statistics earlier this year.
China Unicom reported an overall mobile base of with 309.3 million subscribers at the end of March, down from 311 million in March 2020.
China Telecom announced it would unveil its March figures later this month.
Chinese operators had deployed a total of 792,000 5G base stations as of the end of February, Chinese press reported, citing a government official.
Liu Liehong, vice minister of industry and information technology, said that 5G Standalone networks covered all prefecture-level cities across China, and the number of 5G terminal connections had reached 260 million.
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 also aims to build more than 600,000 5G base stations in 2021, according to the report.
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.
