Bill Huang, head of research and development and GM of China Mobile Research Institute, reflected at the recent Telecom Council Carrier Connections conference on the company’s rapid expansion and looked ahead to the Chinese telecom giant’s plans for creating a “5G” network.
Huang sat down with Derek Kerton, principal analyst of The Kerton Group and chairman of the Telecom Council of Silicon Valley, for a “fireside chat” during the Mountain View, Calif., event.
Huang gave a brief background of China Mobile’s market share in a country that has 1.2 billion mobile subscribers out of a 1.35 billion population base.
“The mobile penetration is almost to 100%,” Huang explained. “In some of the large cities, I think the mobile penetration is way over 150%. China Mobile is the largest operator in the world in terms of subscriber base with 800 million paying subscribers.”
Of those users, 500 million Chinese are using cellphones to access the Internet, Huang said, which has set China Mobile’s capital growth on pace to exceed 500,000 base stations; there are plans to spend $10 billion in optical and fiber optic infrastructure.
With such a booming market, Huang looked to the future.
“The biggest and most recent development in China that’s becoming really hot right now is 5G,” he said. “People say, ‘We just got started on 4G, why are we talking about 5G?’”
Huang forecasted a 1,000-fold increase in data traffic, which would not be met with a 1,000-fold increase in carrier revenue.
“That’s not going to happen,” he said. “Maybe there’s going to be two- to three- [times] revenue increase over the next 10 years, but not 1,000. That means we have to build a radio that’s 300-times better than the one we have today or we’re going to be broke. The math has to come together.”
That’s where 5G comes in, Huang told Kerton.
“We have to get better spectrum utilization. We have to get more spectrum,” he said.
To do that, Huang said China Mobile is eyeing a combination of its cloud radio access network, which is a cloud computing-based large cell, and “single-chip base stations. A popular word for it is small cell.”
“They solve different problems,” he said. “Working together, I think, that will become the next generation thing.”
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