Executives for China’s top two mobile network operators, representing almost 1.4 billion customers, shared their respective visions for 5G today during a keynote at the GSMA Thrive virtual event.

Mats Granryd, director general at GSMA, kicked off the session with an update on the state of 5G, claiming that there will be more than 1.1 billion connections in the Asia-Pacific region by 2025, capturing roughly 23% of total connections across the region.

“The rollout of new technologies like 5G may be delayed, but only in the short term,” Granryd said. To date, 5G has been commercially deployed in nine markets in the Asia-Pacific region and 12 additional markets have announced plans to do so, he added.

“Mobile operators in Asia-Pacific will invest almost $500 billion in the networks between 2019 and 2025, of which $370 billion will be spent on 5G deployments,” Granryd said.

China Mobile, the world’s largest mobile operator with more than 1 billion customers and nearly 500,000 employees, is poised to be one of the biggest 5G spenders in the region. The operator intends to deploy 300,000 5G base stations and 1 million stacks in data centers by the end of this year, said Jie Yang, the operator’s chairman.

The company aims to be the main force behind the development of a digitized intelligent society in China, he said. Like all businesses today, China Mobile is confronting unexpected challenges during the COVID-19 crisis. While it enables resources to fight the pandemic and help to reopen the economy, the company is also encouraged by unmet and widening opportunities, Jie said.

“Human society is facing a slowdown in the economy and the emerging fourth industrial revolution, thus further magnifying the adverse impacts brought by the global pandemic,” he said. “But crisis and opportunities coexist. If you take a look at the historical view, a pandemic will also be a catalyst and enabler for a new round of technological revolution and the transformation of industries.”

China Telecom Chairman and CEO Ruiwen Ke followed up with a keynote focused on the operator's advancements in 5G standalone (SA) development.

“China Telecom is now working rapidly to develop new innovations in 5G SA for cloud and network integration so that we [can] build secure, reliable products on the cloud and network,” he said. That framework will play a crucial role in increasing network performance and provide for personalized services delivered by a 5G core, including network slicing, edge computing, and artificial intelligence (AI).

Ruiwen also highlighted steps China Telecom is taking to develop guidelines and standards for other operators to follow in their respective 5G SA deployments. “China Telecom will be the coordinator for the global industry to draft the 5G deployment standard. This is the first global guideline for 5G SA deployment,” and it will lead to large scale deployments of 5G SA networks across the world, he said.

China Telecom’s decision to pool resources with China Unicom, the country’s third-largest operator, on a 5G radio access network (RAN) is also leading to reduced costs and increased efficiency, Ruiwen added. “We have jointly set up a complete physical network and controllable end-to-end networks. This is the first joint effort by two operators across the world for such a large scale deployment.”

China’s trio of operators activated the world’s largest 5G network in November 2019. 5G SA deployments are expected to reach the country’s networks later this year, but the executives provided no update on those plans at GSMA’s digital conference focused on the Chinese market.