Development happens fast in China and that includes 5G. Less than five months after Chinese regulators issued 5G licenses, the country’s three largest operators have activated the world’s largest 5G network.

5G services are now live in 50 cities across the country, including Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Shenzhen, according to the state-run news agency Xinhua. All three operators are offering 5G service starting at about $18 per month.

“What we are seeing is a concerted effort by the Chinese — the operators, vendors, and government regulators — to deploy 5G as quickly as possible. The same thing is happening in South Korea as well. If there is a key takeaway from this I would say that — as was brought up at [MWC Los Angeles 2019] — ecosystems matter with 5G and that includes the regulatory bodies,” Chris Nicoll, principal analyst at ACG Research, wrote in an email to SDxCentral.

China Mobile, China Unicom, and China Telecom have collectively deployed almost 86,000 5G base stations and expect to have more than 130,000 live before the end of the year. China’s regulatory agency noted that almost 12,000 5G base stations are already live in Shanghai.

In September, China Unicom and China Telecom announced that they are pooling resources to jointly build and manage a 5G radio access network (RAN) to cut costs and share spectrum, but each operator will build and manage its respective 5G mobile core. The carriers each plan to install 40,000 5G base stations by the end of the year, and market leader China Mobile is on pace to install 50,000 by then, according to Chinese news reports.

Roughly 7% of the country’s population — 110 million people — are expected to be using 5G services by 2020, according to analysts at Jefferies. Moreover, 36% of China’s mobile customer base, or about 600 million subscribers, are expected to be on 5G by 2025, according to GSMA. That would translate to about 40% of the entire global 5G market in 2025, the global industry association said.

China’s operators were previously targeting a 5G launch in 2020, but accelerated those plans and in one fell swoop claimed the global lead on 5G deployments. The advancement follows a protracted campaign by U.S. government officials to cripple Chinese vendors and position the United States as a 5G leader.

America is losing ground on that effort, but there are many factors at play, Nicoll explained. “Any other time I would say that this effort in China is really pushing the 5G development forward globally, but with the Chinese vendors being hampered in the global market, Nokia, Ericsson, and Samsung are buffered in the United States against Huawei and ZTE,” he said.

“I'm still hearing reports that Huawei is about a year ahead of the other vendors in key areas such as massive [multiple-input, multiple-output] antennas and radio performance [but] they are behind on vRAN so you need to pick your position on leadership,” Nicoll added.

While China is making significant strides in 5G coverage and capacity, Nicoll argues that those metrics are no longer the defining characteristics of success. 5G is a completely different architecture than 4G LTE, and more significant benefits will be derived from operators’ ability to support differentiated network services, he said.

“Let’s not overstate this. 5G is about services, network agility and new business cases, and all three of those are coming in the future for the most part,” Nicoll wrote. “Broad deployment of 5G is needed to accelerate many business cases, but it needs to include broad deployment of standalone 5G, [mobile edge computing], and devices to really change the game. It’s coming, but not in 2019 and probably not really until late 2020.”