China ended the first quarter of the year with a total of 819,000 5G base stations, up from 771,000 5G sites at the end of 2020, according to a report published by Chinese paper Global Times.
For the full-year 2021, Chinese operators aim to install over 600,000 5G base stations, according to the report.
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.
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.
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 Telecom ended the first quarter with a total of 111.2 million 5G subscribers after a new addition of 7.86 million subscribers during the month.
