The city had over 64,000 5G base stations at the end of December
Shenzhen, a southern tech hub in Guangdong Province, aims to add 10,000 5G base stations this year as part of a plan to bolster internet connectivity and digital economic activity in the city, South China Morning Post reported, citing local authorities.
The Shenzhen municipal government’s Industry and Information Technology Bureau recently unveiled an action plan which involves upgrading 5G mobile services and promoting a wider adoption of its gigabit Ethernet fiber optic network, according to the report.
With the additional 5G base stations, Shenzhen expects its average internet download speeds to reach 500 Mbps, according to the bureau. The city had over 64,000 5G base stations at the end of December, according to the latest official statistics.
The report also stated that Shenzhen aims to get 40% of residential households to adopt broadband connection with speeds of 1 Gbps or higher. Last year, only 15.6% of all broadband users in the country had connection speeds higher than 1 Gbps, according to telecommunications data published earlier this month by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT).
China’s main financial hub, Shanghai, will also deploy an additional 10,000 5G base stations this year, according to recent press reports.
With this planned expansion, the total number of 5G base stations in Shanghai will reach 77,000 by the end of 2023. Meanwhile, fiber optic networks will cover 2,000 office buildings and all newly-constructed smart factories, said the Shanghai Communications Administration.
Also, 5G data traffic is expected to represent over 60% of the total telecommunications traffic in Shanghai by 2023.
By the end of 2023, 5G applications will cover over 30% of education, medical, culture and tourism industries in Shanghai, and over 35% of large-scale industrial firms, according to the local administration.
China’s capital, Beijing, had a total of 63,000 5G base stations as of the end of July 2022, according to previous press reports.
According to Sun Lixin, an official from the Beijing’s communications administration, Beijing had 28.9 5G base stations per 10,000 people.
Chinese operators had deployed a total of 2.29 million 5G base stations nationwide as of the end of November 2022, according to data from China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology.
This figure represents an increase of 862,000 compared to the end of 2021 and accounts for 21.1% of all mobile base stations in the country.
Chinese carriers China Mobile, China Telecom and China Unicom added a total of 29.6 million subscribers in the 5G segment during the last month of last year. China Mobile, the world’s largest operator in terms of subscribers, said it ended last year with 614 million 5G subscribers.
Meanwhile, China Telecom ended 2022 with 267.9 million subscribers in the 5G segment, while China Unicom’s 5G subscriber base reached 212.7 million at end-2022.
